There's somewhere in the ballpark of 166,000 employees at Apple, just unfathomable scale [1]. It is not unreasonable to ask that someone specific is responsible for each particular small feature and ensuring it keeps working. Trying to apply an economic analysis to such a "free as in beer" operating system does not seem to work well. Consider the question of "how many small holes can you have in your wooden sailing ship"?

[1] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/aapl/employees/

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laserlight 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not that it impacts your argument significantly, but for the sake of completeness, Apple employs a huge number of retail employees.

	▲	AlexandrB an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. A more useful number would be how many employees are working on macOS specifically. Hard to find a definitive number for that.

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akerl_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s not unreasonable to ask but they can and are saying “no”.