The way I see it, money can’t buy one of the most important ingredients: the motivation to do the best work of your life. No matter how much cash you throw at a problem, you’re likely just going to get people who want to "do their job" from 9 to 5. Those are exactly the kind of workers that companies like the Apple of 2026 are looking for. It’s a big ship, and it needs to stay steady and predictable. People who want to achieve something "insanely great" or "make a dent in the universe" are just a distraction.

In my experience, shipping a product as polished as Mac OS X 10.6.8 Snow Leopard requires a painful level of dedication from everyone involved, not just Quality Assurance.

As long as neither the New York Times nor the Wall Street Journal writes about how bad Apple’s software has gotten, there’s even no reason for them to think about changing their approach.

The drama surrounding Apple’s software quality isn’t showing up in their earnings. And at the end of the day, those earnings are the "high order bit," no matter what marketing tries to tell us.