I’ve worked with (as in, directly on their team) some of Apple’s QA when I was an intern. They were quite bright and dedicated people. It’s just that their job truly sucks and the rest of the company doesn’t value them. When I was there their daily task was to run the same runbook of basic actions from 8 AM to the afternoon. It used to be to the end of the day, actually, until someone wrote up a Python script for them to save several hours on some of the checks. I had a chat with the actual engineers writing the code they were testing, vaguely pointing towards “hey I heard about CI and automated tests, wouldn’t this make things a lot better?” and he just point-blank rejected it. QA was there to test the code he wrote. There was zero self-reflection on how he could improve or that this process sucked. My impression is that a lot of Apple has a similar mindset which they are slowly working to change.
Far and away the best "QA" people I ever worked with were people who couldn't write a line of code. Because they didn't have a programmer mindset, they also didn't approach using the software like a programmer, which is exactly the sort of person you want doing QA for you.
