The company rescued from insolvency with Microsoft money and reversed buy from NeXT, and only managed to get out of red thanks to the iPod and what came later, regardless of the office structure.
Maybe the products produced by developers that can concentrate better are more valuable and people are willing to pay more for them. Seems like Apple provides 2.4 trillion reasons.
I am sure the office isn't part of the interview casting processes, trying to be hired at Apple is hardly any different from most game studios, regarding what one is willing to put up with to have the name on the CV.
I wonder how the world would be different if Microsoft had just let them die. Would it be better or worse? Would we all have slate-style smartphones now, or would they have taken much longer to arise?
The iPhone wasn't the first touchscreen smartphone, it was just the flashiest (previous ones were oriented at business users), so IMO we certainly would be in the same place, just slightly later and possibly with more choice (maybe Nokia would have survived with Symbian/MeeGo, maybe Microsoft would have managed to pull off Windows Phone, etc.).
Unless there were some phones I never saw, the iPhone was the first slate-style phone that you used with your fingers. Before that, everything had buttons (like the Blackberry, which kept keyboards until they finally died), or had crappy resistive touchscreens that you needed a stylus to use. The iPhone was the first one I remember that had a glass screen with capacitive touchscreen, needed no stylus, and didn't try to copy the Windows UI on a tiny screen.
Interestingly, it came out just before the iPhone, and LG even alleged that Apple had stolen the idea from them. Considering how Jobs stole a bunch of ideas from PARC, and Apple really doesn't have a history of inventing anything, but rather taking other peoples' ideas and commercializing them better, it seems very plausible.
