> 'His products show that he understands design as well as anyone on their payroll now.'

He designed none of the interface.

> '... his obvious coding skills ...'

A lot of the time, a person's coding skills are judged by how readable their code is, and how well they utilize SCM. Also, to be an Apple engineer you want extensive experience with Objective-C. https://github.com/comex/star_

Now I don't mean to say comex is a bad programmer at all, the stuff he writes is amazing, I just feel like he wouldn't make a good Apple engineer.