Apple is a big company, and I'm sure that there is a lot of diversity in how individual people and indeed teams or departments go about making their products.
But during the Jobs days at least, despite Apple's reputation for user experience excellence, I think it was a company that was at best indifferent towards the experience of its users per se. What it was focused on was delivering a clean, powerful, beautiful device.
In a lot of ways, that focus created, as a side effect, a good user experience. Things like really smooth scrolling were born out of a desire to not have the device ever seem janky or struggling, for example, but it resulted in a pleasant user experience.
The App Store featured extremely strong reviews and protections to make sure that people's dumb apps couldn't screw over your battery or slow down your phone or otherwise compromise your experience. That limited utility, but created a clear, consistent, easy user experience.
In other ways, it led to shitty user experiences. My wife could never tell when her phone was ringing. Its ring was soft compared to Android phones and the vibration was much more subtle. But a loud ring or an emphatic vibration don't lead to a prettier, more iconic device. They'll never be features that a tech reporter will do a feature on. They're easy for other phones to do as well. So Apple didn't care.
The keyboard for iPhones was awful for years. Only a single spelling suggestion, no ability to get anything other than letters without hitting a chord key, hard to tell if you were in capitalization or lower-case. But it was a pretty, uncrowded keyboard, despite being just incredibly slower and more painful to use than equivalent Android keyboards. So Apple didn't care.
It was an interesting time, full of UI highs and lows for Apple.