I don't think we're seeing the entire picture - even with the additional data Oren brings to the table in his post. While R&D is important, so are bonuses. I

I don't think we're seeing the entire picture - even with the additional data Oren brings to the table in his post. While R&D is important, so are bonuses. I sure hope all those underpaid engineers at Apple were getting options. On June 16th of 2003, Apple was trading at $9.60. Today it closed over $180... The average stock bonuses reported on Glassdoor are $24+K, on top of the average cash bonuses of nearly $6K. Sure, substantially lower than Google, but much higher than Microsoft. Close enough to make the true compensation a dead heat. Also, I'd love to see the average education level for the Google engineers versus the Apple, Micrsoft, Yahoo, etc folks. My bet, you'd see a lot more PhD's at Google, a lot more. When you have a PhD - and are actually good (!) - you should get paid more. I'm just saying there's more than base salary to take into consideration. And for some, they want to work at Apple over other company plane and simple - not surprising that Apple would use that point to pay less ...