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Comment by inlined | Hacker News Reader

> Apple’s suppliers are forbidden from referring to Apple by name or its project code names anywhere in buildings.

In which buildings? Surely (at least vendor specific) codenames are necessary for basic communication. I was affected when a partner team was sidelined by an Apple contract. It was a fireable offense to say <codename> was Apple or leak it, but you could use <codename> internally to indicate that you had mandated commitments and may not meet partnership goals.

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I worked at a company that did work for Apple. It was a poorly kept secret that they were a client but even in a 50-person company, I had no idea what exactly that team was working on. We definitely were only working in marketing stuff not product because that was our business. We maybe had early photos of phones at best. They had a huge list of secrecy and security demands many of which applied to people who didn't even work on their stuff. I heard nothing but terrible things about how they treated our team too.

I worked at a company (since acquired by Deloitte) that had the security room for the original iPad. There were not many setups of this.

I joined about 6 months after release of iPad but a lot of Apple OS X and iOS consulting was done by folks in the company.

From iTunes to the original Apple Store app there were small, sometimes single person, teams assisting Apple writing this software day in and day out.

They barely reported to anyone, and barely discussed their work. Just clocked full-time consulting hours on behalf the company.

<codename> is Apple was the worst kept secret at my last company. Even our contractors knew who it was.

When you're ordering in Apple like volumes it has to be very difficult to hide.

Yes. the volume narrowed the potential customer list greatly. I wonder if I would have guessed correctly had I not been on the need to know list.

And also when the things you're building (presumably) have Apple logos on them.

There are tons of components in Apple's devices and only a few Apple logos. If you get an order for 70 million higher end tiny lenses you can narrow down the list of potential customers pretty quickly, no logos needed.

"Fruit themed company" or "Company in Cupertino"

Ah yes, Blackberry.

No wait, Raspberry.

Oh, wait, was it Orange? Or Rock? Or ...?

This is a good occasion to recommend a great British comedy sketch:

My Blackberry Is Not Working!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAG39jKi0lI

One reference that may not be familiar to all viewers: when the sketch was made in 2010, Orange was a popular UK mobile carrier.

Enjoy!

Tangential to the tangential topic but this is my favorite tech pun comedy bit of all time. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=67-GeNYShbc

How on earth have I gone nine years without seeing this? That was fantastic!

I worked on an Apple contract in the late 80s - Apple leaked like a sieve back then too, we used our own code name, unrelated to Apple's for the project ... and when their code name leaked we were happily in the clear

We call it "Fruit company"

Same. I bet that’s common unless we’re coworkers.

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