Hacker News Reader

The market cap has grown by ~10x in that time and the number of products that the company makes/maintains has also increased a lot in that time (both number of products and total unit volume). Doubling the staff does not seem unreasonable given the obvious increase business.

So their staffing has increased by a factor of about 2.25 while their revenue has increased by a factor of 2.5 - doesn’t sound so much like a binge as the company steadily scaling up.

On the other hand, Facebook went from about 4,000 employees to over 70,000 in the same time period, so given how much Apple's business has grown in the last decade (when they released the iPhone 5) it seems pretty impressive that they grew only ~2x.

How many are retail employees? I’ve seen 3 Apple stores open in my large city alone and we already had 3.