u/vincentmcguire

First of all, every Apple team writes their own interview so you wont find the same one two times.

Recruiter screen (30 min): Apple recruiters are matched to the team. Mine could tell me the round format and the language they expected. Ask directly, because you will not find it anywhere else.

Hiring manager screen (45 min): Resume walk plus why this team specifically.

Technical screens (CoderPad, 45 to 60 min): I had two. Medium difficulty, no Hard. Correctness, edge cases and memory behaviour counted for more than a clever approach.

Onsite (6 rounds, one long day): Coding one. Standard data structures, mapped onto the team's actual stack rather than a textbook prompt. Coding two. Not a second algorithm problem. They handed me working-ish code and asked me to find the bug and improve it. System design. Cross-device sync. Every follow-up came back to privacy and on-device processing. Offline-first was assumed, not something I got credit for raising.

Low-level design. Object model and API for a feature, judged on how it ages rather than whether it works. Behavioral. Why Apple, and how I operate without full context. That second one is not hypothetical given how siloed the place is. Team round. Two interviewers at once, then lunch with the team.

After the loop: No hiring committee like Google. Written feedback from five to eight interviewers, then the hiring manager decides, with the level (ICT2 to ICT6) set at debrief. Two to four weeks of silence is normal and is not a rejection. Extra rounds after the onsite are also normal.

One thing I would tell anyone prepping: prepare for the team in particular, focus on the tools the team uses often.

Feel free to ask any additional questions.

Saw my aunt yesterday prompt GPT-5 for a shepherd pie recipe. Is it not common knowledge that bigger research models use way more energy than lighter models?

GPT-5 Thinking uses up to ~18 times more energy than GPT-5 Mini for the exact same output.

You don't need to use ChatGPT 5 Research mode to rewrite an email, summarize a paragraph, or answer a basic question. Use the big models for complicated tasks. The rest of the time, use lighter models.

Let's make this widespread public information pls.

I am tired of seeing AI everywhere, especially in places where it doesn’t belong.

Am I the only one who has noticed that browsers now always show you an AI answer to your question, no matter how dumb it is, before any actual websites are proposed? I asked how many people live in Canada this morning and got an AI-generated response, while I could’ve scrolled for 2 more seconds and gotten to the Canadian Wikipedia page.

I didn’t need AI for that!!!

I am by no means a technophobe, and I think AI should be used for beneficial purposes and to help humanity, but this is complete nonsense… (especially knowing that every prompt has a negative impact on the environment)

Before beginning any of this, I'm a 19M at a sorta top college ?? (about T30 in the country for CS). Here are all the ways I've seen people use Cluely in real life, ranked from best to worst:

1. Meta Glasses This apparently works, but I'd say it's pretty risky with younger interviewers. There's a good chance they've already seen videos about people using Meta glasses (and what they look like). However, not a lot of interviewers are young so if you get the chance to get their identity before the interview, go for it.

2. Having the Cluely tab open when the interviewer isn't there Probably the simplest way. You can have Cluely ready on another tab/window and use it when the interviewer isn't looking. The obvious downside is that you have to be pretty careful about him walking around.

If you're nervous/laugh easily, I wouldn't recommend that one.

3. Invisible earbud I've heard of people using an invisible/small earbud so they can hear Cluely's responses. This seems like one of the harder setups to pull off naturally (you need to buy the earbud, set it up, etc).

Though if you can get it to work, it’s unlikely you’ll get spotted mid way.

Those are basically all the methods I've heard about so far. If anyone has tried other setups, please let me know, I’m always curious.