I minded:
• No public stuff, no public speaking, no blogging, no open-source, no nothing (you're supposed to ask; and then you're told no). ;) I know many many people, probably among the strongest engineers I know, with a lot of open-source activity, who quit, refused an offer, or wouldn't even talk with Apple just for this reason. I do miss Apple, but I don't miss that bit, I enjoy every bit of public freedom now (as you can see!)
• Every engineer must be in Sunnyvale or Cupertino. There's a strong anti-remote culture, the right to move away from the over-expensive Valley is only for veterans. They let you be very flexible with your time (you can take some days working remote, as long as it doesn't go against the current projects), but that doesn't solve the fact that you still have to live in an outrageously expensive corner of the US, and there's no other choice. On the other hand, it's kinda cool to say in the morning "oh, I wonder if that bit of the final product could change to accommodate what I'm doing", and to have lunch with the person in charge of it that same day (that happened to me a bunch of times).
I didn't mind:
• "Work hard" culture. I didn't mind, but some people could. Definitely hard to maintain work-life balance if you're not careful.
• Sure, there was no politics and fanboy-ness in my part of the company, but I hear it can be very different elsewhere in Apple, notably outside of engineering.
• Engineering knowledge transmission is badly broken. Nothing is documented, and it's seen as a feature of innovation (I never bought it very much, but who am I to judge, so that's still fine with me). Problem is, in that case, you would expect a solid oral-explanation culture, but it's the opposite too, people expect you to figure things out with no oral explanation of anything. I've heard this numerous times from people everywhere in Apple, so this is not a local culture thing in my department; and as you would expect, a lot of time is wasted that way, either on trying to figure something out for days that could have been explained in 30 seconds, or achieving entire pieces of work that have already been done by other people before, but no one told you even if you asked. I eventually got around that by bugging people and asking them the same questions 10 times in 10 different ways; people were a little bit annoyed, but getting the knowledge made me far more efficient than other recent engineers in my department.
• Not as "fun" as other Silicon Valley companies, where you find workplaces with crazy stuff, and every day is weird. Apple decides not to follow the "there's a slide in my office" trend by design, and I actually prefer it this way. But if you want a truly full-on Silicon Valley experience, Apple is much more "like other companies" in that regard.
