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Apple still has a reputation/image plenty good enough to attract good talent. I assume they just don't invest as much. Hardware and marketing is a much bigger part of their business.

The big differences I've seen between Google and iOS Maps are in the data-cleanup aspect, not the technical aspect. That doesn't take top tech talent, it just takes a lot of man hours (or truly spectacular tech talent to come up with algorithms that don't need the cleanup, but Google isn't there yet themselves).

The iOS maps problem is a dataset problem mostly. Google has a huge head start in that department. That is not a talent problem.