I'm sure apple's "tiny innovative core" is very good at what they do, and works very hard, but I suspect the reason you don't hear as much about the work environment there is that they are subject to much stricter policies concerning what they write about their employer than are employees at many other places including google and facebook.

Add to that a culture that values protecting secrets versus some notion of 'openness', and an incentive to hold onto that job if you really like it and the valuable stock options that may have come with it, and I'm not terribly surprised that you see relatively few insider stories.

Business Insider did a few stories last year, and I seem to have lost a pretty long blog post by three or four former executives that illustrated the Apple life.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-t...

As a person with direct experience of being affected, these stories ring true to me.

My understanding here is that Apple has pretty draconian policies about writing about it. A friend once told me they had to retract an offer from a candidate because the person tweeted they just got a job at Apple.