I'm referring to the company size -- which has some direct influence in how big of a market share Apple can have. My pet theory is that Apple is only as big as Steve Jobs can handle from a management standpoint.

The company is pretty constrained in terms of growth. Engineering team are making do with taking more projects while undermanned and understaffed. There's also a hiring freeze that's been thawing since last year. Also, half of the company size are retail workers.

This doesn't mean that market growth isn't important to Apple/Jobs, but from what I gathered it's not his primary concern or motivation.

Interesting take. I wonder if this is isomorphic to programming team size. If we get rebuild the management culture around spreadsheets and process so we are not dependent upon the key manager, we can scale revenue out. But do we end up with mediocre products and wind up with another me-too consumer electronics company?

Very interesting conundrum if you're on the board...

The dogma on campus was always to maximize what you have instead of adding more to the mix. Some teams are pretty resistant to hiring as it's a sense of pride to be working 80 hour weeks. So in that way, Apple runs very lean. In fact when Jobs came back one of the first decisions he made was to axe the research division in the company not because the company was weak (it had a good chunk of cash reserves) but because it was the easiest and fastest way -- from the management point of view -- for him to get products out. The mentality of the company switched completely and I believe it's partially from that early decision to act as a small company.