Apple Software Engineer interview experience

I was shown a 4x4 board filled with X and Y stones and asked to determine the minimum number of moves needed to get four of one kind connected in a row. It felt less like a standard LeetCode prompt and more like figuring out the right search/optimization angle.

Later, I ran into another set of Apple-specific OA problems on HackerRank that also didn’t feel like typical LeetCode. The questions included a “Save the Plants” task about matching fertilizer bags to plants, and a gift-box balancing problem that relied on doubling and halving operations. Even though these were different problems, the