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>> One thing that was unusual is that all the technical people there understood all aspects of the machine

Is this something 'Apple' specific culture wise, I remember SJ saying Apple was the biggest collection of startups on the planet.

I personally prefer small sized teams with lots of in depth knowledge per engineer on the team. IMHO, unless you have a deep understanding of the machine you are working on, you can't make a difference. Not to say that, without it, one will suck, I guess it is that X factor in the outcome I am alluding to.

OTOH, there are other places which won't stick to small team sizes, more stakeholders, yet succeed. So there is that.

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I personally prefer small sized teams with lots of in depth knowledge per engineer on the team.

Does anyone prefer huge teams in which each person has only a shallow understanding?

If the personalities on the "know everything" teams are not constructive or compatible, then yes--I prefer large, shallow-knowledge-base, specialized teams.

That's not just a personal preference: if you have people that are poor team players who have near-total-overlap with everyone else's skill areas, the quality of the output suffers. It suffers in the long term because everyone wants to leave their mark and has an architectural idea in mind (compared to the a functional high-expertise team's behavior of collaborating at the architectural level and agreeing on a compromise for design direction). It suffers in the short term because burnout, intimidation, and political wheel-spinning become common (compared to a functional high-expertise team's behavior of bringing even comparatively unskilled people up to the team's expertise level surprisingly quickly through a combination of humility, mentorship, and infectious enthusiasm and camaraderie).

Those aren't the only two options. The better one IMO is large teams with small sub-groups, each with at least one person who knows the whole stack top to bottom, with frequent communication between the subgroups. That's pretty typical in the corporate world where each manager has multiple teams under them, one architect, and a liaison to an advisory board to communicate to other teams.

The reason I prefer this approach is something Apple seems to be struggling with: lots of small teams breed lots of small solutions that don't add up to one big solution.

Case in point: I have a latest-gen iPhone and iPad. The iPhone has a touch-sensitive home button, while the iPad has a real actual click-button. The iPhone has no headphone jack, the iPad does. The iPhone is waterproof, the iPad is not. The iPhone has stereo speakers in landscape, the iPad does not. The iPhone has force touch, the iPad does not. The cheapest iPad has support for the Pencil, the most expensive iPhone does not. Moving on to the Macbook, the iPhones and iPads use Lightning to charge, while the Macbooks use USB-C and have never in their history ever even included a Lightning port. The Pencil exclusively uses Lightning to charge and has no other way of connecting, and even helpfully includes a Lighting-to-Lightning adapter in the box, still rendering it completely incapable of charging from a Macbook without yet another adapter to convert Lightning (male) to Lightning (female) to USB-C (male).

There's no real reason for these differences except to say the teams don't work together to synchronize their engineering efforts. Individually each one is a great engineering achievement. Combined, it's a mess of small solutions that don't add up to one big solution.

Alternative explanation to incompetence: iPhone, iPad, and MacBooks are different form factors for different use cases.

iPhone is used in more active situations. Not running in rain with iPad strapped to arm. On iPhone stereo speakers in landscape, not sure what that one means; for me it’s the iPad with speakers on both sides while in landscape. Force touch requires force, easy with a phone in your hand, less easy if iPad propped on origami Smart Keyboard. (Could be reason for button diffs too, light touch with haptics vs. real touch, or just a very common use of home button on iPad is while landscape so you squeeze a “real” button between your thumb and forefinger.) The phone is not slate sized, why should it try to be a slate? Don’t know why you’d be charging a pencil from a MacBook some way you couldn’t charge an iPad with.

To me, seem to be plausible reasons for every one of these differences beyond just “teams don’t work together”. Certainly both are possible, just saying the device modalities are different. ATV, HomePod and Watch UIs are different too.

People read on iPads by the pool or lake or on a boat all the time. There's a good reason to make it waterproof.

Re: the stereo speakers. The iPhone uses the earpiece as one speaker and the bottom speakers as another, so when it's on its side and you're watching Netflix, sound comes out of the top and bottom. The iPad (except for the iPad Pro) only has speakers on the bottom, so when you're using the Smart Cover and watching Netflix, all the sound comes out the bottom. On a device far larger than the iPhone, this really makes a difference.

I don't think a device needs to be a slate in order to be worth writing on. Scribbling notes is easier on an iPhone since you can hold it in your hand, and since you have unlimited pages the increased size of the iPad doesn't matter.

Few would say they prefer that, but quite a lot of people are in situations like that, so they apparently do prefer it.

I suspect that everyone prefers it but just don't have the option. I'd like to hire only people with a deep knowledge of the projects they'll be working on. Turns out that's impossible.

When you take into account the larger talent pool for building a team like that, I'd say probably quite a few.

Especially once you add in the incentive for individual managers to grow their own teams.

It's very much a thing in the traditional corporate world.