[krschultz]

You can interview for all kinds of positions involving classified weapons and intelligence without signing an NDA, but Apple requires you to sign one? What could possibly be so special about their interview process?

I guess they're worried about people gaming the system, but what stops someone from breaking the NDA to one individual going in for the interview and not online? Wouldn't that give the one individual a huge advantage?

(Though I got fingerprinted and background checked before I could even sit down for those interviews)

[KuraFire]

As I said below, it's about the secrecy of the products & plans they're working on. Keeping those secrets is worth anywhere between $200 and $300 million of free advertisement a year (a conservative estimate, these days), so it shouldn’t really be such a shock they’d like to keep secret things secret.

[PakG1]

With the culture of secrecy they have, it's not out of this world for them to want to also establish the culture from the get go and get you to take it seriously. This alone may be reason enough.