I know that everyone is looking at this as "by the numbers" and there is truth to be had there, I offer a different take though. Apple's culture is not all tha

I know that everyone is looking at this as "by the numbers" and there is truth to be had there, I offer a different take though. Apple's culture is not all that amendable to high growth of headcount[0]. Its not in their DNA. Steve Jobs in his return back to Apple setup a cultural legacy around hiring smart, hiring smart, and being intentional. That its better to invest in hiring the best you can and people who fit. When I was there, it was another huge boom time for most of the industry, and Apple still wasn't hiring fast like Meta (then Facebook) or Google was. Some departments in Apple do scale quickly, but typically there is a targeted plan behind that scaling. In essence, they don't like to take shots on scaling the people aspect of the business, because they value culture fit extremely high and intentionally put it ahead of many other metrics internally. That was and I believe still is the case [0]: one can argue no company can take rapid headcount rises, but setting that aside, clearly a lot of companies thought it could work