"Are You a CEO, Director, or Founder interested in a Feature Interview?"
All Interviews are 100% FREE of Charge
This essay is based on conversations with former Apple retail employees in Texas, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy. Business Insider confirmed their identities and employment. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I started at Apple in 2016 as a low-level sales representative and worked my way up to Genius Bar Leadership a few years later.
During my nearly six years with the company, I worked in nearly every Apple Store in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
Every time a new product was released, I volunteered for the night shift and was there all day. Every product was decided almost until the last minute.
Before 2019, when the reservation system was introduced, the only big fuss was when a new iPhone was released. No one lined up for a new watch or a new Mac. They just wanted the new iPhone.
Preparations for the release date began a week ago.
The week before launch, we received a pallet of devices, which my boss stored in a locked location until the night before launch.
The night starts at 10pm, we meet and our leaders come and take everyone’s phone, Apple Watch or computer and put them in the safe.
From that point on, we were not allowed to leave the store or use our cell phones without a manager watching us. We weren’t held hostage, but we were kept in the dark, even though everyone knew what was coming.
So we were working through the night taking all the old devices in the store and updating them to the new ones.
We weren’t allowed to take photos, record videos, talk about anything, or test the devices. They wanted to make their launch day special and get first reactions from actual customers, not Apple employees. That’s totally understandable.
That went beyond trading in a new device and sending the old one for recycling, or whatever else Apple decided to do with the old device.
Rerouting wires under uniformed tables at Apple stores can get complicated when new chargers or accessories are involved. At times, dozens of devices have had to be updated across an entire store, requiring the store’s security alarm to be disarmed before the devices could be removed.
I’d do it until 6 or 7 a.m. the next day. It was hard work, for sure, but always a lot of fun.
On launch day, almost everyone was a salesman.
With permission from the leader, if we weren’t too tired, we could stay on to work on the opening for the first couple of hours. Usually, everyone went home after that, but I was one of the few Geniuses who worked on the technical bookings on launch day.
For the rest of the tech team, it was the one day a year they were told, “You’re not in tech anymore. You’re in sales now.”
The store was usually packed and focused on sales rather than device issues, only allowing appointments in advance for technical issues and not allowing walk-ins unless your phone was completely dead.
My hours were long, but only when I wanted to stay. Some of the leaders were like, “No, you’ve been here all night. Go home.”
Wherever we are, Apple adheres to California state regulations, which require us to take breaks every three hours. Apple cares deeply about the hours we work, and we were never forced to work overtime.
By the time I leave Apple in 2022, the actual excitement of launch day will have died down, but there have always been two distinct crowds.
Some people decided before even seeing the phone that they were going to buy it no matter what, and it didn’t matter if Apple cut features — they wanted whatever the company had to give them.
And then there were the random people who showed up after launch day, curious to try out the phone for themselves.
With the iPhone 16 and Apple Intelligence, there is a lot of excitement around AI across the industry. I didn’t expect Apple to put so much effort into AI. Usually, when new software is released, it takes a few years to make sure it’s running the right way.
But Apple has always done great things with software, so this push into AI is right up their alley.
Apple did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
If you are a current or former Apple employee with any comments, please let us know by submitting your comments to the encrypted messaging app Signal (jordanhart.99) or email (inquiry) from a non-work device.