This article, and the documents referenced within it, are archived on IPFS. If removed from this platform, they remain accessible. Full legal note below.

Today, 1st April 2026, Apple turns 50.

In exactly two weeks today, Apple will be in the London Employment Tribunal on Newgate Street, facing allegations that in June 2024, it discriminated against a disabled R&D engineer who applied to build the next generation of Persona for Apple Vision Pro; technology designed to let people communicate beyond their physical limitations.

That R&D engineer is me.

On 12 March 2026, Tim Cook published an open letter titled 50 Years of Thinking Different. On the very same day, I was in the UK High Court defending my application against Apple, which had previously written an open letter attempting to intimidate me into withdrawing it or face financial ruin.

Exactly one year earlier, on 12 March 2025, I had emailed Tim Cook directly, confronting what had happened during my recruitment in Summer 2024. He never replied.

Three open letters. One company:

• Tim Cook’s, celebrating misfits to the world.
• My email to Tim Cook, unanswered.
• Apple’s, to me, via DLA Piper, threatening over £42,000 in costs, for even daring to file and stand up for what I had experienced in the Summer of 2024 and beyond.

I thought differently. Too different for Apple, it seems.

In the spirit of open letters, here is mine — in text and video form. Note that the article covers more ground, while the video focuses on my reaction to Tim’s open letter of 12 March 2026.

A video like form of this article — Recorded 15 March 2026

I filmed this on 15 March 2026, three days after the High Court hearing with Apple, once the medication cocktail that got me there had worn off. It is unscripted, but is based on some janky notes and editing. It supplements the article, but focuses on my reaction to Tim Cook’s open letter of 12 March 2026.

Who Am I?

I am an R&D engineer, aiming to build next-generation simulation systems. At least I was. Now I’m a litigant in person (pro se), which is not a career path anyone recommends and most certainly not the one I wanted.

I grew up in Great Ayton, a village in North Yorkshire, UK. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by a common theme of simulation; taking what is both possible and impossible in the real world, reconstructing and enhancing it, with full control in a computational domain. This thread has spanned many years of adjacent interests.

At 14, I was a kid, inspired by Industrial Light and Magic, making Star Wars visual effects (VFX) films in my back garden.

By 15, I was teaching myself industry software. At 17, I landed my first professional job, working remotely on physics simulations, and at 18, I entered the ‘Hollywood’ VFX industry.

In my past career (now what feels like a past life), I worked with some amazing people: artists, technical directors, engineers, producers and others who make up elite VFX and R&D teams. These are people who accepted me for who I am and wanted me to integrate.

We worked on crazy VFX shots for awesome films and TV shows, often pulling them off at the last minute. These people saw what I brought to the table, and more broadly, what people like me, in any industry, can bring to the table, looking past our disabilities. They worked with me on the rest. I’m forever grateful for the mentorship, support and encouragement I received.

At Scanline VFX (now Eyeline, part of Netflix), where I spent the longest stretch of my career from when I was age 18–22, I worked on VFX simulations for projects like Game of Thrones, Justice League, Cosmos, and various Marvel projects, building and running simulations to push the boundary, and create awesome shots for the studios, directors and moviegoers around the world. I worked with an amazing team, who I will never forget. I was lucky enough to earn an Emmy Contributor Certificate along the way.

My FX / Simulation Showreel From Working at Scanline VFX

Later, I was lucky enough to work at Framestore and then at Industrial Light and Magic as part of Disney. During my employment with both, post autism diagnosis, I was met with nothing but respect and professionalism, like at Scanline, I was accepted and supported for who I was from day zero. Disney is a company I especially look up to; it stands firm in its values, takes risks, and is still instilled with its core principles and innovation.

Companies like these, made up of great people, proved that for individuals like me, integration is possible with support. I was never looking for a shortcut, and I was always pushing myself to be better.

Among the good experiences, there were some bad; I’d had my fair share of misunderstandings, mischaracterisations, and ostracism, going back to my time at school. I know what it’s like to have to hide to be accepted, masking my own internal reality, in places where innovation is not on par with Equality.

After writing my own computational fluid dynamics solvers and graphics coding projects since 2017, I decided to leave the VFX Industry in 2021 and formally studied Computer Science to deepen my understanding. I wanted to understand the mathematics and algorithms behind real-time simulation, in a more structured setting, at a level that would let me build the next generation of it, not just use the tools, but create my own, for others to use.

University was challenging in many ways, but in July 2023, I graduated with a Master’s degree with Distinction from the University of Leeds, thanks to the support I received along the way. This was without ever having taken an undergraduate degree or even A-Levels (APs-ish in the US). Even dating back to secondary school, where I didn’t take a math exam/final. I did pass physics, though 😅 My path has been unconventional, to put it mildly. I think this is becoming more common for people with differing neurotypes, plastic brains, in a still rigid world.

A Life Overshadowed By Disability

With that in mind, the conditions that made my life such a bifurcated milieu were present since birth, and looking at the odds, it would seem I stood no chance.

I have three main neurodevelopmental conditions: Autism, ADHD, and Developmental Coordination Disorder (Dyspraxia). There are others, but I don’t want this to become a medical report! Last year, I was diagnosed with 47,XYY (Jacobs) Syndrome, which lays the genetic substrate for how I ended up with such a collection of conditions and the comorbidities that accompany them. They wreak havoc in my life and make each and every day a unique challenge, as they do for the millions of others around the world who deal with these conditions, in isolation or as a package deal.

Yet, after a rough period in school, I escaped, dedicating myself to my passions, sharing my work online, and seeking companies that would accommodate me. I’ve spent most of my life undiagnosed, and only did it happen accidentally, at 24, leading to a cascade of initial enlightenment as the wave function collapses on each new diagnosis, and then returns to its fuzzy superposition of self-acceptance and doubt.

The simple truth is that life is brutal under this combination of conditions. Even Apple conceded my disability status at a preliminary hearing in February 2025. It is not in dispute; there’s just too much data.

Despite this, in the past, they had never stopped me from dreaming and building, and I wanted to build with people, not alone.

My Recruitment Into Apple’s R&D Team

In March 2024, I applied for a role as a 3D Animation Engineer within Apple’s Vision Products Group R&D team, working on Persona, Apple’s photorealistic real-time telepresence system for VisionOS for Vision Pro and future hardware. I was set to begin working on the next generation of the photorealistic embodied telepresence.

The technology is designed to let people communicate beyond their physical limitations. For someone with first-hand experience of an agoraphobic and isolated AuDHD life, this was not a product demo; it’s tech that combines the lived experiences of isolation and the deep technical background and interests I have that carry me through life.

Given the nature of the opportunity, it was the culmination of everything I’d been building towards. I paused my own start-up and PhD plans to pursue it. That is how much it meant.

Yet, even during this interview process, I was building and advancing my own projects, both open-source and private, in a constant effort to challenge myself.

Between April — June 2024, I completed 10 interviews, speaking with engineers, managers, and, finally, a Vice President of Engineering at Apple, as part of an intense but rewarding interview process. I met many great people, across multiple countries and office locations, who I was looking forward to working with at Apple.

As one can imagine, it’s a tough process, having been tested on all the relevant topics to the job and beyond. The feedback was positive throughout, and an engineering manager suggested compensation would be discussed next.

On 4 June 2024, after being told the process was complete, I was informed during a call with a recruitment manager at Apple London that I would receive an offer within 48 hours.

This is the moment anyone in R&D dreams of in their tech career…

The Allegations

However, as alleged, that was until I candidly disclosed the details of my disabilities and requested support to integrate into my would-be team at Apple.

This was a choice, by myself, to be upfront given my current health state and recently diagnosed ADHD, coming to terms with the confirmation of another neurodevelopmental diagnosis (AuDHD + DCD). I had also just started taking stimulants, prescribed by my doctor in London, who I’d been to see multiple times, and had seen early positive effects.

In response. Apple removed me from the process.

If only I had known how much I’d regret an honest disclosure I had made about conditions I had never chosen to have. It’s deeply sad that even here in the UK, some Disability Charities suggest not disclosing your status until you have a signed contract. I thought Apple would Think Different.

After an attempt to get the situation reviewed, I was locked out of the company’s comms, and by 14 June 2024, I was left in the wasteland that followed.

Even now, Apple tells me that no offer had ever existed. Yet since November 2024, after obtaining Apple’s own internal documents, through a UK GDPR Subject Access Request, it recorded the recruitment team as “Moving to Offer Niall,” with an internal document titled “Request to Hire: Niall Horn” and a confirmation that “Offer is in guidelines.”

It seemed my role, even the tasks I would be working on (also provided, with internal project names, not shared here), had been set; my work location and starting level, ICT3, were all on the table.

These are Apple’s own words, in Apple’s own systems, provided to me by Apple’s own data protection team under UK GDPR Article 15 in November 2024. They still sting. However, this is just one of a series of items that went on to rule my life. Phone calls, Slack chats and iMessages, discussing me, my disability, and my presentation will be presented to the UK Employment Tribunal in two weeks.

While I won’t cover the direct effects this had on me and my health in this article, they will be part of the hearing, and they were dire. I’ve been irradiated, and my mitigation attempts, including rare opportunities to work at places like Meta and world-model startups, became impossible because of the effects this had on me.

I gave up, and I was lost.

A Disabled Litigant in Person vs Apple

I was told early on: “Pick your battles.” That’s a nice soundbite, if you’ve never had to stand up for yourself and if the battle you’re fighting isn’t a war declared against yourself for having conditions you didn’t sign up for in the character creation menu of life.

The effects of the situation (regardless of liability) were eroding me. I knew both paths would lead to pain, stand up and face an adversarial process by design, or don’t stand up and lose myself. Yet one can imagine a random guy from North Yorkshire trying to find legal representation against the second most valuable company on the planet, for Disability Discrimination and Victimisation is not exactly easy.

When I was barely functional, and as a product of my medication becoming unstable, I was wasting any cognition I had trying to articulate to people who never called back. Charities and government services don’t really deal in the relativistic scale of a situation like this, and I most certainly would not have received government-funded legal aid.

Yet, here we are, over 20 months later and somehow, I’m still here. I’ve had to become a Litigant in Person to stand up to what I believe occurred, while continuing to live at the mercy of my conditions, and come to terms with the Kafkaesque situation I find myself in.

There is no equality of arms when you are a disabled engineer, out of work, going from medication to medication, taking on a company with the second-largest market capitalisation on the planet, with a well-documented history of litigation conduct and an unlimited legal budget.

I allege Disability Discrimination and Victimisation under the Equality Act 2010. These claims were first filed in the UK Employment Tribunal on 29 August 2024.

Three Open Letters

From the very start of my recruitment, before interviews began, in March 2024, and very true to Apple’s brand identity, their email footers included the following statement (and various permutations of it):

“At Apple, we’re not all the same. And that’s our greatest strength. We draw on the differences in who we are, what we’ve experienced, and how we think. Because to create products that serve everyone, we believe in including everyone. Therefore, we are committed to treating all applicants fairly and equally. As a registered Disability Confident employer, we will work with applicants to make any reasonable accommodations.”

This led me into what I believe was a false sense of security, to discuss myself, as a whole person, technically and the parts of my life that were a struggle, not that it should be a taboo, identity-defining matter to have disabilities and share that information.

What followed were three open letters, two of which are spaced exactly one year apart, that say more about Apple’s relationship with inclusion than any recruitment email ever could.

Letter One: Mine to Tim Cook (March 2025)

In October 2014, Tim Cook wrote an essay for Bloomberg Businessweek. In it, he became the first Fortune 500 CEO to publicly come out as gay. He wrote about what it means to be in a minority, to fight to be seen, and to face discrimination for who you are. He wrote:

“if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it’s worth the trade-off with my own privacy.”

He finished his essay with:

“We pave the sunlit path toward justice together, brick by brick. This is my brick.”

That meant something to people like me. More than most things a CEO has ever said.

Given the damage I felt had been done in 2024, I decided on 12 March 2025, exactly one year before the High Court hearing, to email Tim Cook directly at [email protected]. Tim’s email address is publicly accessible; a continuation of the tradition Steve Jobs established.

I wrote to Tim because of that 2014 essay. Because I know what it means to fight to be seen. However, unlike Tim, I had a bigger issue, which was blocking my acceptance in the company, one that appears to supersede any chance of discrimination against my sexuality. I wrote:

Further, I told him about the painful irony of the technology I would have been working on:

I told him I should have been “working on the VPG R&D team at Apple London, helping push the boundaries of the Vision Pro and its upcoming successor.”

Instead, I was writing as someone who “had their dream job stolen, not because I wasn’t capable, but because Apple refused to accommodate my disabilities.”

I tried to articulate the loss of a job, which was more than a job; it was a life, access to future friends, colleagues, and networks, one cannot recreate easily in any other setting. This was the loss of what I called ‘Life 2.0’, a chance for someone like me to truly integrate, with support, into a hybrid office environment populated by people from diverse backgrounds and with a wide range of life and career experience. That’s what I believed made Apple’s products great from a human aspect.

However, ultimately, I knew that I was the one who had truly lost.

Tim never replied.

Whether he read my email, I cannot verify. But the mail server received it, and it was directly disclosed to Apple’s legal team during proceedings in June 2025, just three months later.

However, I’m still open to speaking with Tim, if he’d like to. I don’t exactly have high hopes, though.

My Application for Contempt of Court Against Apple (October 2025)

Over the following months, Apple repeatedly told the UK Employment Tribunal, both in formal applications, pleadings and correspondence, that no offer had ever existed. Yet throughout this time, I obtained my own data from Apple under the UK GDPR (as noted) and Legal Disclosure (strictly confidential and not shared here), which supports my belief that Apple is entirely contradicting itself.

In September 2025, when paired with further submissions to the Tribunal supporting their applications, I decided I needed to stand up not only for myself but also to ensure my case would be heard on a fair substrate of the UK Justice System.

After once again attempting to seek legal advice, while lacking the financial means for any long term retainer or direct access, with no callbacks and overwhelming odds, I spent many sleepless nights trying to teach myself the deeper aspects of the UK Civil Procedure Rules (CPR), specifically Part 81.

This led me to file an application for Contempt of Court in the High Court against Apple. I affirmed my application in person, and it was served on Apple on 14 October 2025.

Contempt of court is a quasi-criminal matter. I did not take that decision lightly then, and I do not take it lightly now. But when a party’s statements to a court appear to be contradicted by their own internal documents, the court should know about it.

Letter Two: Apple’s Intimidation Letter to Me (November 2025)

What I received from Apple in response was not a standard legal defence. It was very different from what I had sent Tim by email back in March 2025. One that, because of its very nature, is labelled a self-declared “open” letter, Apple has allowed me to share with the world.

In November 2025, DLA Piper, one of the largest law firms in the world and Apple’s legal shield in the UK, sent me this letter. I note that every legal communication I have received from Apple since proceedings began has come through DLA Piper. I wrote to Tim Cook as a human being. Apple’s response came through its external legal vendors.

The letter opened by acknowledging that I am a litigant in person and that I am disabled:

“I am conscious that you act in this matter as a litigant in person (“LIP”). I am also conscious that you are a disabled person and are disabled in a variety of manners as detailed in your application to the Employment Tribunal.”

Yet this linguistic othering never validated the need to assert a fact I was already well aware of.

It then spent five pages explaining why my application was hopeless and what it would cost me if I continued. £14,350 already incurred. A further £28,000 if it proceeded. Pursued on an indemnity basis. I note that as of March 2026, this had risen to over £60,000. All before my application had even had a chance to be heard for permission to move into contempt proceedings.

More perplexingly, the letter described my application as an abuse of process and accused me of “browbeating” Apple (browbeating is a form of intimidation or bullying). The few people I have shown this letter to have gasped in shock, checking to make sure it was Apple accusing me of “browbeating”, and not the inverse. I find a stark hypocrisy in such an allegation against someone who has aimed to conduct themselves with a level of rigour that I continually try to apply to myself and legal submissions as a disabled Litigant in Person, to produce the best submissions I can.

From the advice I’d received, it was clear — this is not standard litigation correspondence. Standard costs correspondence identifies cost exposure and invites settlement. It does not spend five pages building self-serving written arguments for why the other party is an abuser of process. It does not characterise a disabled litigant in person’s application as “browbeating” a company worth trillions. It does not dress up intimidation as generosity.

The letter came to a close with a delightful section titled Apple’s offer:

“Apple considers (in the light of the points made above) that this is an extremely generous offer and it trusts that you shall recognise it as such.”

The “extremely generous offer”: withdraw within seven days, or face £42,350 in legal costs (far more than my means, given that I have not worked for multiple years) was jaw-dropping. And yet I’m reminded, this was all before a judge had even heard my application and granted permission. It seemed Apple were desperate to prevent this reaching a judge’s bench, in my opinion.

I told Apple that I would not withdraw my application within two hours of receiving this letter. While I’m not afraid to admit that the letter achieved its initial shock-and-awe effect on my autonomic nervous system. I would not be intimidated. Courage, it seems, is indeed defined by still feeling fear, but still choosing to do what is right, and for me, that meant most certainly not withdrawing a lawful application I had made to the High Court.

Yet, Apple’s characterisation remains: a disabled, unrepresented litigant, surviving on disability benefits and haemorrhaging savings, browbeating a company worth $3.8 trillion. Imagine that.

Letter Three: Tim Cook’s to the World — March 2026

On 12 March 2026, Tim Cook published an open letter on apple.com titled 50 Years of Thinking Different.

Tim’s letter is a celebration. Of progress. Of people who imagine “a better way, a new idea, a different path.”

He states:

“That’s because progress always begins with someone — an inventor or scientist, a student or storyteller — who imagines a better way, a new idea, a different path.”

But I read it differently now. And I suspect I’m not the only one.

Tim later notes: “At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday.” Over the past 20 months, that has become clear to me. The misfits, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes; throughout history, those labels have not described people celebrated at corporate anniversaries. They have described people excluded, segregated and forgotten. Those who actually think differently have rarely been invited to the table.

Tim thanked “our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey.” A team I was so close to being a part of, and in some ways I was, up until the last moment, when an attempt to be honest about who I am cost me the opportunity. He wrote about Apple’s trust.

“Your trust drives us to do better.”

Trust. I trusted Apple. I disclosed my disabilities candidly because Apple’s own recruitment emails told me they were committed to inclusion and reasonable accommodations. I trusted that a company built on “Think Different” would understand someone who thinks differently. That trust was not rewarded.

And for every person like me who discloses and gets shut out, there are others watching, learning the lesson: don’t disclose. Don’t trust. Hide who you are. That is the real cost of what happened, not just to me, but to the culture Apple claims to be building.

In speaking about the tools from Apple, Tim wrote: “In your hands, the tools we make have improved lives, and sometimes even saved them.” Yet Persona, the technology I was hired to build, is designed to enable people to communicate beyond their physical limitations. For people with agoraphobia, mobility conditions, chronic illness, treatment-resistant depression or those who cannot always be in the room, this is not a product feature. It is a lifeline.

The irony of building accessibility technology while refusing to accommodate the engineers who build it should not be lost on anyone.

Tim closed with:

“If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

“So here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”

I always felt like one of these people. Not by choice, not by identity, but by pure emergence. I am part of a subset of a subset, and I wanted to reach out to others within these groups to build tech at the forefront of innovation and equality.

There are millions of people with neurodevelopmental conditions, physical disabilities, and chronic illness who are told the door is open, who are shown the recruitment emails about inclusion and accommodation, who see the rainbow emojis and who take that at face value. Only for them to find out too late that the commitment ends where the inconvenience begins.

My 12th March 2026 — Facing Apple’s Attempted Erasure

Yet my 12th March 2026 was quite different to Tim’s; I was getting ready at 4 am after another night without sleep, heading down to London King’s Cross, and from there to the Royal Courts of Justice.

It’s nothing short of deeply twisted that, in actuality, this hearing took place one week after it was originally scheduled. Apple had initially applied to have my contempt application struck out as a procedural matter heard by a Master. If that had succeeded, no High Court judge would have seen my application for what it was, and it could have been disposed of without me being heard.

Thankfully, the court rejected that approach and listed it for an oral hearing on 12 March 2026, coinciding with the date of Tim’s letter by pure synchronicity. While this last-minute switcharoo cost me over £600 in non-refundable train tickets and hotel bookings, the bigger impact was that my entire extensive preparation, the psychiatric support, and the physical toll of getting there had to be done twice. I do not believe that a law firm of DLA Piper’s standing, instructed by senior King’s Counsel from Littleton Chambers, filed that application by accident.

After some caring accommodation by the High Court, and while Tim was finalising his letter to the world, I had my chance to stand up not only for what had now become a 60,000 GBP+ cost threat, but to prevent the erasure of my right to be heard by a High Court Judge.

The hearing was held in public at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, a menacing yet cool-looking Hogwarts-esque building in Holborn. It was a very challenging experience, sitting on the bench next to a King’s Counsel barrister, who had passed the bar exam the same year I was born. Respectfully, I am proud of the justice system we have in the UK, which accommodated me so I could submit my submissions to the judge, and the court made it as accessible as possible.

Ultimately, Apple’s attempt to circumvent the standard legal timeline, as evidenced by their costs letter in November 2025, coupled with what I believe to be their impetuous strike-out, failed. The case was not dismissed; it’s stayed.

We will resume this case after the facts have been tested in the UK Employment Tribunal in two weeks’ time.

Note: Out of respect for the UK Justice System, I have not placed the PDF of this order on the IPFS, despite it having been heard/drafted in Public. However, you can download it from Proton in the link above.

What It Actually Costs People Like Me

While Apple pursues me for their legal fees, sums of money that would bankrupt me multiple times over, the cost to me is much greater, and it transcends numerical values. Regardless of the outcome at the Employment Tribunal, liability or not, my life and career trajectory as I knew it are gone. Not as a product of the hearing, nor a product of me talking here about it, but from the instant these events happened, everything deviated into an unplanned trajectory converging to entropy.

The only way I got to the High Court, to stand up to Apple’s attempted strike-out applications, was through a combination of benzodiazepines, anti-emetics, beta-blockers, and stimulants, all prescribed and supervised by a leading research psychiatrist who has been by my side throughout this process. Because without that intervention, my autistic brain would not survive the journey.

I don’t have a legal team. I don’t have an entourage. On the day in the High Court, I had my mum with me, but there was no backup plan. Just me, a suit I’d bought purely for attending court, and three-ring binders.

On the train home, the medication crashed. Just before drifting out of consciousness, I emailed my consultant psychiatrist:

“Part of my brain wants to sleep, the other part is just going absolutely crazy… Yet somehow I did it.”

It was a mix of feelings. Apple’s attempt to silence me before my case could even be heard for permission in the High Court, just over a month out from our Employment Tribunal hearing, had failed; yet the cost was huge. Four drug classes, and a desire to stand up for what this has actually cost me, not in GBP or USD, but in value to myself, and others like me.

That is what it takes to get one disabled person through one half-day hearing. Apple does not know what it costs because it has never had to.

Documenting the Journey

I first addressed this publicly in a LinkedIn statement to my professional network before any hearing had taken place on 14 January 2026.

I have been documenting this process in multiple ways, from my own first-person standpoint, not to perform, but because I understand how unusual it is. Recording my thoughts out loud, whether sitting at my workstation, wondering why legal documents fill my screen, or attempting short walks around a nearby field, speaking into camera glasses in the open air. I’m not sure if any of this footage will see the light of day outside of its encrypted cold storage. But we’ll see.

I understand that there aren’t many litigants in person who take on a company of Apple’s size, for 20 months, across two courts, while managing the conditions I have, and I think the process itself has value (although I’m not sure how much). No matter how incessant it has become. I believe we are all here to accumulate experiences, good or bad, and share that information. As of now, my story is pretty locally bounded, but I hope that by speaking out, combinatorics may help expand this domain.

Apple at 50

Today is the 1st April 2026, and Apple is 50.

It’s also April Fool’s Day, yet I’m the one left feeling like a fool for believing this was a conduit to the integration I desired.

Paul McCartney is headlining Apple’s anniversary celebration at Apple Park. The irony of a Beatle performing at the company that spent decades in a trademark war with Apple is apparently lost on the marketing team. I suppose litigation is only a problem when the other side won’t drop it.

The Final Liability Employment Tribunal Hearing

The Final Liability Hearing for my case lasts 5 days, and starts on 14 April at the London Tribunals Centre, 7 Newgate Street, London EC1A 7AZ (Case No: 6009910/2024).

Anyone can attend. I encourage you to remain sceptical, form your own view, and attend if you wish. That is what open justice means.

A company built on “Think Different”, a slogan coined the year I was born, will spend its anniversary month in a London tribunal, facing allegations that it discriminated against an engineer who thinks differently, literally, neurologically, genetically, from birth.

Apple is a member of the UK Government’s Disability Confident scheme. A voluntary, public commitment to inclusive hiring. The protections Tim Cook was calling for in his 2014 Bloomberg essay, protections against discrimination for being who you are, already exist in UK law under the Equality Act 2010. For people with disabilities. On paper.

As stated in my video, I’m not a misfit for being a misfit. I’m not an outcast for being an outcast. I’m a member of society who was born at a disadvantage. That’s not by choice. That’s just an emergent property of having three neurodevelopmental conditions and the comorbidities that accompany them.

I’m Still a Fan of Apple (…at least the tech)

It might be somewhat of a surprise, but I am not anti-Apple. I’ve used iPhones exclusively for nearly a decade. I work on a Mac alongside my Linux and PC workstations. When Apple shipped ARKit and dual cameras on the iPhone 7 Plus, it was one of the things that convinced me the future of spatial computing was real and worth building towards. I admired their technology. I believed in what they said about inclusion.

I think Apple’s technical stack is remarkable. The unification of hardware, software, platform, operating system and the underlying supply chains into a single ecosystem is something no other company has achieved at that scale.

While Apple have yet to ship a single feature I was set to work on, and continue to hire for the team I was dropped, I will continue to be excited about the future of Persona. Like the awesome research from Meta on Codec Avatars, and other companies and academic institutions working in this domain — Real-time simulation of human presence, built from sparse sensor data, designed to let people exist beyond physical limitations, is genuinely exciting. Tech like this is a first step toward the future of presence, and while I say that as a huge fan of the TV show Pantheon and Ready Player One, I genuinely believe it has the potential to support people in ways we cannot yet even imagine.

The role itself means so much to me; it was the embodiment (if you’ll pardon the pun) of my ambitions. More so, it was a conduit to a life; working with a team of people, in a stable environment, on technology I care about, with a product that could genuinely change how people connect. I hope one day it becomes accessible to everyone.

I’m still mourning the loss which robbed me of my drive, my passion, and my health.

A Speculative Symbol Dump

Many will note that Apple’s Vision Pro ships with two downward-facing cameras pointed at the wearer’s body. Their capabilities have been publicly reported since 2023 (MacRumors, UploadVR), but the features have not shipped. Yet, multiple reported public patents support what appears to be egocentric body tracking; Meta even shipped this on the Quest 3, two years ago (IOBT).

During the process of writing this article, in its later stage, I had a particularly bad day, a long-running instance of sensory overload from medication side effects, exacerbated by litigation stress and perpetuated into the night of relentless depression. Usually, this is the kind of day where productivity drops to zero, and immobility becomes a constant.

Yet with the support of a small dose of controlled medically prescribed benzodiazepines, and a sudden itch I’d not felt for a while, I got curious. I grabbed my M2 Mac mini that I’d bought myself back in February for a birthday present, used (8GB… I know)! A Mac with the same core SOC inside Vision Pro v1.0. After some noodling around and attempts to summon my distant knowledge of Apple’s dyld_sharedcache, I became curious whether any of the function symbols of the tech I’d have been working on would be present.

It wasn’t long until I realised that I opened the VisionOS Simulator within Xcode ships with a mounted disk image containing what appears to be the full VisionOS system volume; the same operating system that runs on the Vision Pro, compiled for the simulator environment and distributed to every registered Apple developer. A grep here, an otool call there, and somehow I had the ability to utilise nm --demangle, on a set of private frameworks inside.

Within a few hours, I had demangled C++ symbols, namespace hierarchies, and function signatures for exactly the kind of pipeline I was hired to work on. I’d located the solver, the calibration pipeline, the configuration schemas, multiple generations of the pose estimation code compiled side by side, and the acquisition that seeded it all — IKinema, the company Apple bought in 2019 to build egocentric body tracking, the team I was being hired onto. A company that I had even experienced their tech from when working in the VFX Industry.

Over 1,400 function stubs and 183,000 C strings in one framework alone. I even located Espresso, which Christopher Karani recently created a cool project with https://github.com/christopherkarani/Espresso to train transformers directly on the Apple Neural Engine (ANE).

I may write up this process at some point; I’ve even managed to extract an IPSW for v26.4 and decrypt each partition. However, my intention is not nefarious conduct.

To be clear: I have no intention of reverse-engineering Apple’s tech for my own use (I’d much rather write my own tech when able). I spent 6+ years under an NDA in the VFX industry, with daily access to assets from HBO, Marvel, and Warner Bros. I understand the trust and boundaries between curiosity and confidentiality. Running Apple’s own tools on a publicly distributed binary is not the same as leaking proprietary code (not to mention the complexity involved). Had I ever signed an NDA, I wouldn’t have even attempted this. But Apple removed me the moment before this was possible.

The bittersweet irony was not lost on me: sat in my flat, at 3 am (the best time to be awake), reading the binary Mach-O dumps of the technology I believed would be my conduit to integration at the company I thought valued me; technology that exists inside a simulator, accessible from the corner of a desk, collecting dust, without ever touching a Vision Pro.

Yet it all started on an evening when my body was falling apart, just over two weeks out of what will likely be one of the most stressful 5 days of my life.

Closing Thoughts

I guess this makes the fourth open letter discussed here. And I’d like to say directly to Tim — that sadly, this has been my path to justice, and it has not been sunlit. It has been lit by the backlight of my monitor, alone, preparing skeleton arguments against your King’s Counsel, mourning the loss of a dream role.

You said you’d pave the sunlit path toward justice, brick by brick. I’ve been laying bricks too, yet I’m still waiting for the sunrise.

Yet, in the past, I’ve experienced the immense warmth and support from companies that hired me, supported me and met me where I was at each point in my life.

I want to build simulation tech again, to enable simulations that put users and viewers in a world that is accessible and engaging, at the frontier of where technology is heading. I want to do it in an environment that treats innovation and equality equally, where people like me can not only build tech but also build lives and integrate.

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.”

— Tim Cook, 50 Years of Thinking Different, 12 March 2026

For those who actually think differently. Not as a brand, but as a life, and one we didn’t choose.

Thank you for reading my story so far.

Niall George Horn — 1st April, 2026
[email protected] | Signal: @niallhorn.91

What I’m Sharing

These documents have minimal redactions (addresses and personal info only) and are hosted on IPFS, as is this article. Respectfully, for the UK Justice System, the court order is linked separately on Proton.

I am using IPFS to ensure that my side of this story remains accessible, regardless of what happens to this platform. I encourage anyone who supports the principle of open justice, or who has the means or interest to do so, to pin these files.

Legal Note / Disclaimer

All material in this article is lawfully obtained: personal correspondence, data provided under UK GDPR Article 15, and publicly filed court documents. No judicial disclosure material is included.

No NDA or confidentiality agreement exists with Apple (UK) Limited or its parent Apple Inc.

No Rule 49 order or reporting restriction applies. Where third-party material is reproduced (including screenshots of correspondence and publicly available statements), this is done under fair dealing for the purposes of criticism, review, and reporting current events. All legally related quoted material is the author’s own correspondence or publicly filed court documents.

No Apple employees are named aside from CEO Tim Cook. References to discrimination and victimisation reflect my pleaded case and are presented as alleged, not facts.

The UK Employment Tribunal will determine the facts of liability, starting on 14 — 20 April 2026.

The UK High Court will determine further facts arising from this regarding Contempt, should the applications be unstayed in October 2026.

IPFS Persistence

The documents above are pinned to IPFS for censorship resistance. If this page or its hosting is taken down, the content remains retrievable via any IPFS gateway using the CIDs below.