Apple Memories
A few memories from my time at Apple.
First iPhone
My first iPhone was a breadboard on my desk. There was no battery; it was
connected to a power supply, and the display, processor, and such were separate
components connected by cables.
I wish I had a picture of that; it would make a nice souvenir.
Double-Secret Lab
One of my earlier memories from Apple was when we were porting OS X from PowerPC
to Intel. Most employees were not told about this, including some employees in
the Core OS group. So our lab to work on this was in a secluded area. After
using your employee badge to get into the building, you had to badge in again to
get into a lab. But our Intel lab was actually behind another door inside that
lab, a secret lab inside a secret lab.
Assembly Line of Engineers
The Intel transition was secret right up until Steve Job’s public announcment.
Apple wanted a few hundred systems available for external developers but did not
want to diclose the project to the usual assembly line workers overseas. So
engineers in corporate R&D were recruited to work on an impromptu assembly
line in Cupertino for a few days. This included instructions not to walk on the
main street, to avoid attracting attention to groups of Apple engineers going to
an unusual building.
As you can imagine, engineers are a lot more expensive than the usual assembly
line workers. And they are also a lot more inexperienced at it. I heard
afterward the defect rate was quite high. So I expect this was Apple’s most
expensive assembly line producing the worst quality results.
Merger and Acquisition
Once I was asked to go to Russia to help evaluate a company Apple was
considering purchasing. It is not always a company’s products, market position,
or intellectual property that Apple seeks most. In this case, a large part of
the value was the employees. So we were asked to interview the employees to
decide how many we would hire.
In many jobs, you may have a performance metric as part of your annual employee
evaluation, some measure of how much work you accomplished. I heard a metric for
a Merger and Acquisition employee was to buy two companies per month! (According
to Tim Cook, from a BBC
article, Apple bought 100 companies in six years, so it looks like M&A
may be falling short of its goal.)
Apple Energy
I worked at Apple during several exciting transformations. The first was the
transition of Mac from PowerPC processors to Intel processors. We created
iPhone, and iPad, AirPods, and more. Working at Apple was intense, but,
interestingly, it was not frenetic for me. I describe it as high energy. There
is always a lot to do, too much to do, but it is advancing toward goals and
getting things done. It was different from a prior company I worked at where
employees were also under pressure but management was disorganized or off track
or failing.
Announcing iPhone
When Steve Jobs spoke with employees about introducing iPhone, he mentioned he
ordered a lot. He sounded genuinely concerned; you could hear the humanness in
his voice and his worry that he was really taking a chance with the company in
committing so much to iPhone.
Company Store T-Shirts
The company store in Infinite Loop used to be independent from regular store
operations. Somebody there made new t-shirt designs regularly, so I have a
variety of custom shirts, like “I visited the mothership.”
Tom Jones in the Cafeteria
From time to time, Apple would bring in a musical act for the employees. It
was a bit bizarre to see a big act like Tom Jones performing in the cafeteria.