As much a I love my work, I won't love it more than my wife, or my future children.
I mean, if you look at it from something of a Homo Economicus point of view, consider the pay rate a good developer gets, and that that money for the weekend is essentially getting donated to Apple Inc, a massively profitable corporation.
You seem to imply it's either passion or compensation which looks like a false dichotomy to me. Lots of people have passion for their work but still they're smart enough to avoid companies who treat the passion like a weakness to exploit so that they can pay lower wages.
Put another way, if you are going to end up working over a weekend, would you rather do it because you love your work, or because you get paid time-and-a-half?
If the majority of the earnings from your work goes to someone else and you still have to do work really hard ("because we're changing the world! everyone has to pitch in! weeeeee!!"), you are ipso facto in a position of weakness and are not earning the respect of your superiors.
There is something that seems very wrong about this.
The rest of what they write isn't bad: everyone likes to feel like they're working on something that matters.
Do Apple offer stock options? Bonus per project?
Other factors could be: what's the impact of having Apple in your CV? Getting to say you worked on project X ?(Apparently this is something Apple limits disclosure, still, if you're an cell phone engineer not a lot of projects you could work)
Sacrificing your life for a company's profit looks like the job is only a physical process of "turning a money machine".
And of course, I hate sacrificing weekends and holidays.
Or is it more about balance and avoiding extremes?
I would hope that my view is about balance and avoiding extreme, like it was the case in the game industry a few years ago.
About your suggestion, not all of us are willing to do that move ( to "cheaper" country, as we've got anchor in our live, family, friends, cars, house, pet, etc .... ), or got jobs that cannot be done remotely. I have already moved to another country, not because life cost was cheap, but because it was less stressful for me.
I am passionate about my work but I mostly focus that passion on side projects and hobby (that is for free). Not saying that mixing work and passion is bad ( I think, it is great ), but that can easily be abused ( game industry, animation industry ).
I think it is wrong to push people from the start to work on weekends (that was the way I read it), it is the fastest way to burn them out (speak of personal experience here, first company (start-up) I joined payed me ~900$ a month but I didn't care because I was motivated, worked 10am-8pm~1am including some weekends, after 5-6 years of this I was a mess, Apple is hopefully not be the same ).
Steve Jobs clearly did, and wanted people with that level of commitment. Can't fault him for trying to find people willing to give him their lives.
He did great