Not trying to refute what you said, but am curious what makes you think they are the most desired to work for? Do many of your programmer friends want to work there?

As the comment above infers - this is getting into mythical man month territory, where adding extra people may even slow the entire project down. Apple seems to have incredible discipline around scope, and they have delivered a series of amazing products. It's something we can all learn from.

> The idea they couldn't afford or have the capacity to hire the talent they want is ridiculous.

Actually, it isn't. Hiring people is hard, and hiring bad people is expensive. It isn't even really a problem you can pay your way out of either, judging who will do well within an organization is incredibly difficult.

All that aside, I would be surprised if Apple didn't have internal budgets for their various projects. The latest version of OS X probably gets a budget on par with that group's market value, so it only has the hiring capacity of its tiny slice of the richest company in the world.

Well they didn't become the richest company in the world by being bloated, slow, bureaucratic and inefficient. It's arguably what nearly killed them in the first place.

How much money they have is irrelevant. They're not a charity. I'm sure they have enough data from OSX Lion upgrades and periodic software update checks to know that the cost of supporting old 32-bit systems was more than they would make from upgrade purchases.

""The idea they couldn't afford or have the capacity to hire the talent they want is ridiculous."

This is true to some degree. I'm certain that if Apple decided they were willing to pay $800K/year each + signing bonuses of $3 million dollars for a team of 4-5 share OS engineers, they could, in fact, resolve this. (I base the $800K on what top flight OS/Kernel consultants make - around $400/hour, plus the money you would need to pull them away from their stock/equity packages at whatever other company they were working at, sometimes known as a "Make Whole" package)

The problems with that, though, is that the average Apple Sofware/OS engineer makes around $200K/year (fully loaded) - so you would end up with a $600K (+signing bonus) disparity - which would be unfair to existing employees.

You can't increase the salaries of all similarly qualified engineers to $800K - that would mean increasing salaries of _all_ engineers - and Apple's R&D costs would skyrocket, and all their other salaries would be out of whack.

Sometimes, even though you can buy your way out of a situation, the peripheral costs of doing so are so great, that what seems to be only a $10million problem to solve, might up ending costing you hundreds of millions of dollars.

So - you suck it up, stay focussed, and do what you can with the people you have.

Of course, what _most_ companies do, is instead hire some average (or, often, below average) engineers to try and do the port - they muck it up, and they ship a crappy product.

Better to do fewer things better. For example - photo stream and iTunes Match have been working well for me - but I wonder what percentage of Apple Employees use iCloud.com as their principal mail client, as compared to google employees using gmail as their primary email system?