1. Harder for employees to access iPhone 14 prototypes to test features while working from home. In office, anyone can probably just walk up to a station and start testing their team's features immediately. Work from home means they must be mailed updated iPhone 14 prototypes contstantly to test. Knowing Apple's extreme secrecy, they might limit shipping iPhone prototypes in the mail just in case they got lost. So the guy who was suppose to test this feature might have not even received a prototype.
2. Lack of good communication for work from home means something like this could have been missed
3. Employees slacking off at home instead of working
4. Employees are less engaged while working from home, leading to carelessness like this
5. Employees are too busy playing with their cats, distracted by their kids, distracted by people in a coffee shop if they are working there, distracted by a video game they have opened on the other screen, etc.
6. The guy who was supposed to write an automated integration test for this was too drunk on his margarita while "working" from the beach.
Probably dozens more reasons.
These obvious and silly mistakes are becoming far more common. It is as if work from home employees do the bare minimum.
None of us here have data on Apple employee productivity, creativity, and engagement level. Only high-level Apple executives do have this data.
But we do have two pieces of evidence that working from home isn't working for Apple:
1. Tim Took and the rest of the exec team are adamant that employees must return to office
2. Poor product and software quality and a lot of delays
And please, don't tell me that Tim Cook wants employees back in the office because he wants to fill his billion dollar spaceship office. He doesn't give a damn about the spaceship office if his employees are actually more productivitive. Clearly, they aren't more productive.
