I'd love to hear from anyone else who work(s/ed) at Apple to confirm or deny this story.
There were actually very fast ways to get fired - but if you were likable and didn’t leak you could work there seemingly forever making no progress and frustrating the people buying the “do your life’s work” pitch.
I was in a small auxiliary team though. The main way you could get fired was becoming the “directly responsible individual” for something important to a senior person and dropping the ball. But there were so many roles the senior people didn’t trust or care about that there was ample opportunity to never have one of those hot potatoes tossed your way in a team like mine. Frustrating, if you wanted to catch one and do something that mattered (tm) as young me did.
That kind of story is one you'd hear about "rest and vest" in the late 2010s.
The dept I reported to was laid-off en mass in late-2015/early-2016.
I interviewed for the iOS design team later that year and after several months and two interviews was ghosted and never heard from them again.
I feel like every large company has a former employee who can say "there's a lot of people there doing nothing, there's people playing politics, and there's too much bureaucracy to get things done." It's hard to tell just from comments if it's better, worse, or the same at Apple versus the other behemoths.
Despite these kinds of comments, every year, Apple ships quite a lot of software. Even brand new entire operating systems like vision OS -- even if that's of course to some extent reusing a lot of other components from macOS, iPadOS, etc. But even re-use can carry still carry significant overhead.
Idk I guess at the end of the day I'm still pretty impressed at Apple's ability to ship well-integrated features at scale that work across watches, phones, and laptops--AI notification slop aside.
I also think it is expected for any sufficiently large bureaucracy. Scale is hard.