I created a separate account to write this comment, since it's going to be harsh.
I work for a Bay Area technology company with a decidedly mediocre engineering team.
My experience over the past 2-3 years is that the worst software engineers (at our mediocre organization) are being hired by Apple. This is totally anecdotal and the sample size is maybe five. But I just cannot escape the fact that Apple continues to hire our engineers that barely know how to program.
Hiring engineers in the Bay Area is hard. I'm sure Apple has a deep bench of talented engineers, but my own anecdotal experience tells me they have very much reduced their standards.