I applied through an employee referral. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Dec 2012
Interview
The phone interviews consisted of an initial screening that involved general OO design, then the phone interviews asked for more detailed technical tasks. They are often very interested in past projects, so be able to talk in length about things you've worked on. On site was long, from 9:45-4:30, consisting of 6 45 minute interviews. Questions ranged from debugging a toy program they had written to designing out an application I was planning on working on.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Reverse a C string that has a special character encoding. Special characters are two bytes and are preceded by a flag character represented by the highest bit being set to 1, then the following bits specifing how many special characters will follow. The special characters are be interspersed between normal characters.
I applied through college or university. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Apple in May 2012
Interview
Phone screen, 30min call, ask me about my background as well as the technique question. I answer correctly , then give me offer. Seems they are need a lot of people to solve current problem.
I applied online. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Oct 2012
Interview
Contacted for phone interview and got scheduled within the next two days. Two people were phone interviewing me and asked mostly programming exercises. No algorithm, conceptual, or problem solving questions were asked. Questions like write a function for the given function prototypes.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The unexpected question was about reversing a singly linked list with the given prototype. But I was the one to be blamed as I wasn't well prepared.