Apple hardly cares about giving engineers/researchers (outside Apple) a wet dream with their contribution as much as they care about doing what matters - build

Apple hardly cares about giving engineers/researchers (outside Apple) a wet dream with their contribution as much as they care about doing what matters - build stuff that people are willing to pay for. They care about that so much that it's evident with their brand realignment from Apple Computers to Apple Inc. "No engineer in his right mind cares about coolness of Apple brand." -I am sorry, we must've missed the survey that day on HN "I also rarely see researchers from Apple at any CS conference (WWW, SIGIR, VLDB) while there are thousands of Citation for some of Google's prominent papers PageRank,GFS,MapReduce and countless in IR/Machine Learning." -Haha, you are comparing Apple to Orange literally here. Apple completely is a consumer need (hint: people who are willing to pay money to solve their problem) driven company and it's pretty evident - just take a look at the new Apple Tv (sure it's not technically impressive, but they listen alright). And iPad? -Show me a company from your list that has an unbelievable focus on executing something so well. There's much too fragmentation even at Google's Labs. But Apple somehow works perhaps maybe because of the sheer control of Jobs and that may be all the difference. Remember, the iPhone is no easy feat and that wouldn't have happened if Apple hadn't first started work on iPad. So, in some weird way, the iPad gave seed to iPhone which made iPad possible. And dismissing iPad outright as a design innovation alone would imply anyone could've done it (hey, remember JooJoo Pad?). I am by no means an expert/hardcore fanboy of Apple but your thesis seems to be spread too thin - from your salary discussions, it looks like you are basing your whole line of argument based off a few TC articles. And besides - what kind of recruiters are offering 150k at universities?