It's a winning business strategy, especially when you have legions of die-hard customers who won't leave you. Microsoft has a similar situation (though many probably won't leave MS for different reasons), so it's in their business interest to increase profits by subjugating their customers with annoying ads baked into the OS. What do they have to lose? It's not like Apple's/MS's customers are going to switch to Linux (which has its own problems of course).

To be fair to Apple, it does sound like this is a somewhat rare bug (only seen in high-load situations?). It's not as bad, I think, as ads in the OS. So, as you say, Apple just needs to be a little better than MS and that's good enough.

This bug dates back to Job's tenure. Apple products were not without bugs from 97-01. In fact, they had a lot of them.

The CEO doesn’t control the fix rate of audio bugs. There’s a few layers of management between those two things.