Jobs referred to the Mac team as "artists" and the Apple II guys as "bozos"
The company almost collapsed under the insane price of the gen 1 mac ($2,495, or nearly $8000 today) which lacked a desperately needed cooling fan and also didn't have color graphics.
I'm not sure if Jobs kept doing that after he came back in the late 90s, but that practice was generally not very effective from a mangerial perspective.
https://9to5mac.com/2017/06/28/iphone-creation-click-wheel-t...
And although we cannot really know how much that internal competition contributed to iPhone's success, I think we can imagine that if Apple had shipped an iPod control interface (wheel and click button) with a phone inside it, it would have been nowhere near as successful as it was.
It called the fully adjusted number “community adjusted Ebitda,” by which it subtracted not only interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, but also basic expenses like marketing, general and administrative, and development and design costs. Those earnings were $233 million, WeWork said.
Uh, you mean net income also known as "net profit"? So your question is effectively "has anyone cared about profit in decades?"
Well... yes
You understand Apple spent like billions for this electric car industry that never produced anything? Why would they want to starve the AI project now?
You understand how many people in Microsoft and Google are working on AI adjacent projects? Even if they aren't AI researchers, there's tons of work just to put the models in useful applications.
Interest rates? I'm sure self driving cars will also shift society one day. But money isn't free anymore And in the case of R&D they can't amortize the costs of devs either. it shows how many companies really care about "changing the world".