Even though they must be (given the realities of software development and the time windows they want to hit), it is still mind-boggling to think of a company like Apple (with its vast cash hoard) as resource-constrained with respect to what is probably the most important component of their flagship products.
I think Apple is a much smaller company than they look, by profile or even employee count. I think their core OSX/iOS developer staff is small, and rather mobile in terms of what they're working on. Those core devs have been shifted around before, delaying an OSX release to help out on iOS.
I think that the constraints are not cash, so much as bandwidth and team size.
It seems to me that the 'Jobsian' management style has some inherent boundaries in how large such an organisation can get. By that I mean if you have
a) a micro manager that wants to be involved in all important and medium important product and marketing decisions and
b) this micro manager as the actual CEO of the company
you will run into some limitations. There's only so much a man can review and decide on. Now, of course, Tim Cook is probably not that person, but the Jobs legacy seems to live on in how the 'second line' (Ive, Schiller,..) and everyone after them still acts.
In the longer run, from what we can see from the outside, only Ive has the potential to step into Steve's shoes when it comes to designing new product lines. I'm very curious about how he will manage iOS, at the least we're in for a few surprises in the near future I'd say.
Software teams rarely scale well -- sure management styles and culture will come into it -- However, scaling and layering up software teams is horrendously inefficient. I'd argue that's a bigger boundary.
If you take software out of the equation - Apple is pretty huge. Both in their own right & positively massive when you consider their contractors and partners.
I'd argue that you really can't do that in this case. Apple's main value proposition is hardware/software integration and if your software teams can't keep up it will limit the product lines you can manage. However, in Apple's case, most of their product lines sell so incredibly well that they still operate at a massive scale, even though they have a limited amount of chips in the game. This is of course where Tim Cook comes in, and why he's CEO now.
OTOH, it's not like iOS is a monolithic thing, and people just work on the new version of iOS as a general concept. It's hundreds of little pieces that all work together. If a few of the new ambitious parts are behind schedule, then those particular teams may need to have more people added to them. But there's probably some guy working on the updated Calculator app that think iOS 7 is going just fine from where he sits.
Even though they must be (given the realities of software development and the time windows they want to hit), it is still mind-boggling to think of a company like Apple (with its vast cash hoard) as resource-constrained with respect to what is probably the most important component of their flagship products.