Apple was pretty clearly shaped by their near death experience and it showed on the balance sheet. It took them a very long time for them to start returning cash to shareholders, but Tim Cook finally did it and that was the right capital allocation decision. They've returned $186 billion via buybacks and dividends since then and cash (and equivalents) has grown in spite of it.
They would rather stay relatively small (115k employees but over half of that is probably retail) and operate like a start-up than grow headcount to support more products. Frankly that's the right decision. There's been a lot of whining from Mac fans about being neglected and today people have been sharing this Vox piece [1] saying they should change to support more products, which would be fine if it wasn't the fact that being resource constrained is part of Apple's organizational culture and if it wouldn't kill the magic that led to their position in the first place.
They would rather stay relatively small (115k employees but over half of that is probably retail) and operate like a start-up than grow headcount to support more products. Frankly that's the right decision. There's been a lot of whining from Mac fans about being neglected and today people have been sharing this Vox piece [1] saying they should change to support more products, which would be fine if it wasn't the fact that being resource constrained is part of Apple's organizational culture and if it wouldn't kill the magic that led to their position in the first place.
[1] http://www.vox.com/new-money/2016/11/27/13706776/apple-funct...