Company: Apple
Date: 2013-02-08
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

It depends on which department you work at... avoid IS&T
Pros: Apple discount is ok.  When you start, you will receive a $500 bonus to be used every 3 years so buy something immediately.  25% off one item from each product family per year - desktop, ipads, iphone, etc.  15% for up to three friends every year.  If you work in IS&T and you love project management, then this is for you.
Cons: Every IS&T department team is governed by the onshore and offshore vendor model primarily from India companies.  If you enter as a developer, you will be involuntarily assigned to work as a technical program/project manager role where you will delegate all your code to onshore and offshore developers.  Sometimes you'll get good developers, but most of the time, you'll get mediocre or below-average developers.  There is no diversity in this department as the overall ethnicity is 99.999% India descent.  Most of the senior managers are not technical, not hands-on and rely solely on the  program/project managers/consultants to deliver all projects for them.  The technical knowledge is heavily relied on the consultant/contractor engineers.  The performance reviews can be conducted  arbitrarily and can be tweaked at the discretion of the manager.  It depends on the manager's integrity and honor if he/she will base your performance on merit.  Over time, the more you do project management work, the less you will do technical work unless you put in long hours at night.   The management team will do whatever possible to protect themselves and avoid all risk.  There is a lot of politics and arrogance.  One director hired most of her managers from her previous company.  Everyone who knew the director ascended to management ranks by this association.  So either it is by coincidence or maybe cronyism?  If you don't belong in that "3com club", then you will not be as richly compensated.  e.g. The managers brag to their employees about buying and/or rebuilding 1- 3 million dollar homes (ground up) in areas of Saratoga, Cupertino, and Evergreen.   

Just to emphasize, this is for the Apple IS&T department.  All other product development teams - iCloud, iTunes, etc. will not have this environment.  Furthermore, it can be confirmed that those departments are more diverse in ethnicities, rely on badged employees for development work, and work long hours depending on the team and project.