Is Ana Arriola From ‘The Dropout’ Real And Did She Design the iPhone?

The true story behind Theranos continues to fascinate us with the dramatization of Elizabeth Holmes and her high-tech healthcare fraud on Hulu, The Dropout. But hold up a second: That employee Holmes poached from Apple, the one who not only supposedly suggested Holmes sport black turtlenecks just like the late Steve Jobs, but also supposedly designed the iPhone… Yeah. Ana Arriola. Is she for real?

The short answer? Yes. But not exactly like you saw her portrayed in The Dropout. On the show, Arriola is played by Nicky Endres, an Asian-American non-binary transfeminine queer actor who previously performed on the reboot of One Day at a Time. In real life, Arriola is a queer Latinx woman of trans and non-binary experience, according to her LinkedIn profile, which she/they has been keeping pretty active. Arriola also gave Endres a recent shout-out over Twitter in the days leading up to Thursday’s Hulu premiere.

Back in December 2021, as the jury deliberated Holmes’ case, Arriola wrote: “When I took the job as Elizabeth’s Vice President and Chief Design Architect, I was an eager employee blinded by fame and opportunity and the cult of working for Elizabeth. She was on her fast ascent, convincing everyone that her science fiction project was real and could change the world. I left my job at Apple to follow her leadership at Theranos.”

On the Hulu series, we can see that Arriola has to press Holmes for even the most basic specs to help her design the machines for Theranos.

“Within months, I understood her fraud and left Theranos.”

She describes that four-month period of her life as Theranos vice president and chief design architect now as “Altruism through Corrupt Unethical Science-Fiction.”

Now Arriola works for Microsoft, currently leading design and research for that company’s Physical Operations Cloud.

But what about Apple and the iPhone design?

Well, Jobs infamously took credit for a lot of the product design at Apple, although we know that Jonathan “Jony” Ive served as Apple’s chief industrial designer for decades. Arriola doesn’t list iPhone designer on her own resume, instead writing “led the creation of Apple’s hardware acceleration of iPhone and Apple TV’s UX and iOS SDK through the novel combining of W3C/Open Web and Core Animation.”

If you can figure out what that means, you’re smart enough to design an iPhone yourself.

Where to watch The Dropout