Hardware Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Apple with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 73.1% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through college or university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Durham, NC)
Interview
Initial "informal chat" that was actually an interview on campus. Asked a mix of technical questions (stress/strain diagram, necking, etc) and design questions based on an example in my resume (they asked me to redesign a project I'd worked on based on fake client feedback). And a brain teaser. Some discussion about finite element analysis work that I'd done after my freshman year and some in-depth questions on how FEA works.
Second interview was 30m phone interview with 2 hardware engineers. I expected technical questions but got none. The interview was all about how my design process works, and was rather ambiguous.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Advantages/disadvantages of tetrahedron and hexagonal FEA elements.
Interview was long, deeply technical, and challenging. I found it fun. Wish I had studied up on analog circuitry beforehand - was vastly unprepared for that discussion and that's what lost me the interview. Oops! Some questions were detailed design questions that required 30-45 minutes to completely answer in detail. This was perfectly acceptable.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design questions on analog op amp circuits. Should not have been difficult or unexpected, but I'd been doing nothing but pure digital circuits for years and needed a review.