The Apple brand has some serious cachet. They can attract top-shelf people, and keep the salaries reasonable.
I worked for a company that had similar "cachet," and they were cheap bastards, but they did keep people, and their posture resulted in remarkably few "non-serious" applicants. The people who applied really wanted to work there.
As a hiring manager, I appreciated not having to sort through a pile of totally unsuited résumés, and, as a bonus, the ones that were unsuited, on paper, were often the high-achieving, ambitious "diamond in the rough" types that I looked for.
I worked for a company that had similar "cachet," and they were cheap bastards, but they did keep people, and their posture resulted in remarkably few "non-serious" applicants. The people who applied really wanted to work there.
As a hiring manager, I appreciated not having to sort through a pile of totally unsuited résumés, and, as a bonus, the ones that were unsuited, on paper, were often the high-achieving, ambitious "diamond in the rough" types that I looked for.