Those increases are only non-trivial and meaningful to employees who have a non-trivial or meaningful amount of equity. In other words a very small percentage of employees.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if Apple also compensated some high-value non-engineers in stock. To find the actual number of people who benefit, you would have to include them, plus you would have to add in all the people who don't work at Apple but own Apple stock directly or indirectly (for example, while I don't work at Apple, I probably own some stock because of my participation in a mutual fund).
I'm pretty certain that there are tens of thousands of people who see an increase in earnings because of Apple buybacks. The majority of them might be well-off since they are engineers or have the luxury of purchasing mutual funds, but I am hardly a millionaire or billionaire.
EDIT: Did more Googling; Apple's stock jumped around 12% after announcing their buyback, so the bonus is around 3%. I would love a $6000 bonus/year for the next few years. [0]
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2018/05/12/what-impa... [0]
General consensus I've seen on Blind is that FANG engineers take in about half their wages in stocks, but that includes multiple years of RSU refreshers and appreciation.
But there's another way to think about it: buyback money isn't that much different than a dividend where people self-sort into who wants the money now versus later. Apple approved a 100B buyback program in May, and 4,915,138,000 shares outstanding. 20 bucks a share. Most offers I've seen on blind are around $100k of shares, so for AAPL at today's market close price that'd be $9300 dollars returned. Probably a bit more given they're at an all time high and the announcement was a few months prior.
So the 12 percent figure kinda makes sense: 10 percent or so of the shares announced to be retired via, and a 2 percent jump is explainable via typical earnings.
I doubt you'd find an engineer paid in RSUs who wanted to end buyback programs, but maybe one will pop up on HN and enlighten us.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.0785%25+*+1+trillion+...
These one time increases and whatever other bread crumbs that get handed out are sculpted to feel good at that moment, but pale in comparison to the truck that's going to hit them down the road when the completely unnecessary government budget deficit as a result of tax relief for the rich starts eating away bit by bit at the government and country. This isn't hyperbole. This is history repeating itself.
Apple has an Employee Stock Purchase Program, where you can automatically invest some percentage of your salary (I forget what) into Apple stock, which gets purchased on your behalf every few months at a discounted price. It's a pretty nice program and it means anyone who takes advantage of it (which really should be every employee who isn't living paycheck-to-paycheck) will benefit from an increase in the stock price.