The thing I found by far the most interesting is about the sales process / incentives.
On the one hand, Apple is not encouraging dysfunctional competition within the team:
> We aren't paid on commission, but you fear for your job if you're not selling enough.
And yet on the other, they are:
> We have a posted list of our metrics, and you can see everybody else's. It shows you how much money each person is pulling in for the company. If you aren't doing very well, you start getting manager meetings, and they sit you down and try to figure out why you aren't selling more.
The best explanation of this I've seen is in the work of W. Edwards Deming. His Red Bead experiment demonstrates that in any system, there will be variation that is due to the system itself, and not due to the individual efforts of the staff themselves. Because of this, league tables and metrics randomly and arbitrarily punish people for performance variation that is out of their control.
http://www.redbead.com/what/
Deming even listed "evaluation by performance" as one of the seven deadly diseases afflicting the western economy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Seven_Deadly_...
On that basis, I find it strangely contradictory that a company with such ongoing quality efforts as Apple has produced a sales process absent of the disease of sales commission, yet still suffering the disease of Evaluation by Performance.
It's possible, however, that Apple is being more sophisticated than the post author realises. If they have statistical control charts, for example, there may well be no contradiction here at all (they would only be reviewing exceptional outliers). But with Apple's tight-lipped nature, I don't know if the evidence to decide that is out there yet.