I applied through university. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Feb 2016
Interview
I got contacted by a recruiter that I met at a career fair, and had a couple phone interviews. After two phone interviews with two people on the PD team, I did not end up getting another round. I was not prepared for the questions they were going to ask me. I definitely should have prepared more because they try to stump you. They asked me some behavioral questions like what are your 3 biggest weaknesses as and engineer, as well as hard technical ones that I could have answered by reading off a table from a textbook. In fact, I indicated that I could look it up, and got scolded as I was informed that that was not the point of this technical interview. So word of advice: Ask politely before any technical questions if its okay to look something up, or just don't look stuff up. The advice that I got from them afterward was that they just want to see my process, so always explain your thoughts.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
If you had a string and wrapped tightly around the world and you wanted to lift it up 1 m off the ground everywhere, how much would the string have to stretch?
The interview went well overall. The interviewer opened with a discussion about a project I'm proud of, then a beam scenario question that covered structural and load analysis, stress and deflection, and material selection — testing my ability to connect first-principles thinking across the full problem space.
I applied through university. I interviewed at Apple (Cupertino, CA) in Apr 2026
Interview
Interview with hiring manager then virtual onsite. They ask you general mechanical engineering questions as well as questions dependent on type of team and skills they are looking for. Not bad overall just brush up on basic beam deflection, GD&T, Design analysis etc.
They gave me a take home tolerance analysis worksheet. It was essentially a tolerance stack up for one of their products and felt fairly straight forward. Thought I answered it well but ultimately they decided to move forward with other candidates.