Apple

• Nice perks • Super casual dress code • Really nice people and interpersonal culture • Can actually take accrued vacation without anyone complaining • Stock has been doing very well • Heavy marketing means you can impress everyone when you say where you work.

• Lots of weird managerial politics.
• Endless meetings to get anything done.
• Ridiculous amount of secrecy causes animosity between different teams and makes it take forever to get anything done unless it's high priority or "for Steve".
• Way understaffed for software engineering in most departments; prepare to work lots of overtime.
• Some senior engineers have been around for 20 or 30 years. No matter how out of touch they may be, they will have a significant say in projects tangentially related to them.
• Corollary: Don't be young.
• Software engineering culture is fad-driven (and we're talking weird Apple-only fads like GCD) on the desktop, and rushed and buggy on embedded.

Software design mimics the organization that creates it. By separating desktop and embedded development with such an insane amount of security checkpoints, you're ensuring that economies of scale and scope that could come from sharing embedded and desktop code will never happen, no matter how much management tries to force it.

And getting caught between these two worlds is infinitely frustrating.