I'm sure at a certain stage it is prototype, in secured buildings. But I have a friend who works at Apple full time remote (for a dozen years now) who routinely gets unreleased hardware at home to work on the software changes for. They is very intentional about only revealing stuff after it is public, which I think is still technically a breach of his NDA (revealing that they'd been working on it).

You mean easy to argue? The lab workers would get no remote days per week due to their jobs. The workers who can be fully remote are being forced back.

> many of apple’s most important employees

What do you mean here, by "many", exactly? Kind of odd to argue that everyone should go to the physical office because "many" must, when, let's be honest, "many" here is probably less than 1%.