Comment by wyager

All software development is ultimately dominated by complexity management asymptotics.

Every tuple of

    (engineers, organizational structure, choice of language, ...)

Generates a function mapping from <complexity of problem> to <complexity of solution>

The asymptotic behavior of this function determines the most complex problems you can solve before the complexity of your solution (the software) blows up and becomes unmanageable.

Apple's function currently has subpar asymptotics on the software side, so they've hit the bounds of complexity that they can properly handle.

There are a lot of things you can do to improve your asymptotics: engineering org structure improvements, switch to programming languages with better complexity function asymptotics, etc. etc., but any of these changes require an organization with the executive function and insight to actually make the jump, which is by no means a given.