There are literally hundreds of thousands of software engineers employed at companies that are of similar prestige and pay as Apple, and many of them will be on HN. If you're getting paid $500k at Netflix/Google/Meta, why work for $400k at Apple?
Uhh no, have you ever dug into compensation that most companies that post on HN are offering? They are offering regular old CRUD enterprise level compensation and “equity” that probably won’t be worth anything
Sure, but that has nothing to do with what I said. There will be many HN users who are earning as much or more as Apple engineers, even if many are earning much less, so assuming that someone here would definitely jump at an Apple offer is not particularly reasonable.