Company: Apple
Date: 2018-02-22
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Another Ibrick in the IWall
Pros: You can experience what being part of the hive mind means . 

You can buy a phone for 100 euro.

The name is all that matters.
Cons: Let me start by saying that the position has very little enterprise left in it due to the fact that Apple is making very little money from their professional products and some of them have been discontinued/phased out or replaced with their consumer counterpart.
This is a glorified consumer support nowadays, with ALL the implications of it. I would not be surprised if they will outsource it too.

When I started, we were supposed to support Pro apps/servers/SOHO integration.
By the end of the first year, 1 pro app was discontinued, the other two had very little call volume (meaning that only people using them privately knew how to support them), training for servers was left to people's goodwill (or naivety, depending on the point of view) since apple did not care about their servers and SOHO was a sorry joke about assisting old people resetting their routers.
If you have any skills, this position is a slap in the face, if not an hindrance to your career.
Unsurprisingly, by the end of my second year, 94% of my team of 15 people had been replaced with much less skilled advisors, which are also payed less.

During the week, 90% of your daily activity at apple will be trying to "convince" people with blocked phones that the consumer- hostile policy you are trying to push their way makes sense, all the while repeating nonsensical pre-written statements about how happy you  are the customer is using apple.
And don't forget to ALIGN! whatever that means. 
You work on Saturday/Sunday for no reason, since the kind of service does not require availability, and you get maximum two calls (about locked phones). 
Enjoy sitting there for hours doing nothing on the weekend.

Nowadays, it is just call after call from angry people forcefully transferred by the outsourced t1, which uses every possible excuse to transfer enraged people your way, just to avoid getting a bad survey.

The training provided is cheap, in particular after the few experts have been forced to leave, and also totally for your own development useless  you want to stay in that same position your entire life.
You can get their certifications but you will not really be able to use them outside of apple. You should really put all your efforts into taking a couple more expensive certifications from other vendors and then just leave.

Due to the fact that  many people are buying into the rationale that being part of a big company gives them prestige or personal value, apple will always have a cohort of drones ready to replace the ones that open their eyes and leave. 
Having some sort of public persona (like being part of some public organization or organizing public events) will boost your career incredibly, since apple will be able to put their hat on it, while doing 0 for it.  In that case, you will be promoted as soon as it is technically possible, which means 6 months.
As a consequence, career paths are 100% reliant on your social skills and 0 or your actual skills/work ethic.  
It has become a recurring joke with one of my ex colleagues (an engineer) which applied to a position, only to have a guy flipping burgers in mcDonalds being hired instead of him.

The people working there are among the worst I have ever met.
Cronyism is rampant, with people referring relatives/friends and then giving each others kudos in the end of the year review or abusing the WOW, to boost their stats and be promoted.

Some will go out of their way to downplay others, quite often starting real wars between teams to either make themselves look better or to diminish other people's results.
Managers using WhatsApp to discuss work related matters.

Team nights were relatives/partners are invited.

One thing I have never seen anywhere else that often  happens in apple is that someone will make up an issue and its solution, and then go around advertising the fake issue as the most important and critical of all. Then of course they come up with the solution and they get credited by their managers, which are not going to waste time trying to double check facts.

Some other people have built their careers by rewriting public facing articles in the internal wiki and "selling" them as their own original work to their managers.

Unless you want to live in Cork, which is a nice city but does not offer much, you can only work from home.
If you work from home, your career chance reaches negative values.  You are going to be cut off from any social activity and be checked for every action. There is no way for you to be moved to the office unless you move to another department, which will not consider your application unless you are already in Cork.
Just don't do it.

Any kind of criticism is heresy and will turn you into an outcast.

The salary is lower than the market average, which they try to even out by giving you a discount on their product every 3 years and a couple of shares every year. 

One of their benefits should be paying for your training/certifications, but they only pay you Apple certifications from Pearsonvue, which they later do not allow you to have on your personal account, so keep that piece of paper safe since there is no way to get a duplicate or a link to it.

They will use leftovers from the kitchen to have "free food" events for employees. Enjoy your diarrhea. 
The food is expensive and the quality is poor.

You are forced to watch their boring commercials during team meetings and pretend you like them.