This might be misleading. I've got a Japanese model Pixel -- except that I bought it in Chile, from a Chilean supplier. (Had to root and tinker with some hidden partition just to disable the camera shutter sound.)
Of course everyone's experience is different but Apple's software is pretty far from "Just Works". Especially their macos with the recent update to Big Sur as well as multiple OS updates during Catalina. In the 1 year I have owned a 16 inch macbook pro it's bricked on me twice because of their "Just Works" OS updates and had to take it to the Apple store to get it reset. Not to mention the issue of not being apple to open non-apple apps at one point due to a bug on their side. I have had issues with Windows and Linux, but nothing close to bricking my machine. It seems to me Apple's way of doing business is if it's not an Apple product, we have no interest. They really want to lock you in which is fine cause they are a business but that mindset is extremely dangerous in my opinion.
Yeah, I didn't have the "it just works" experience. The last iPhone I owned was an iPhone 3s, and an update nearly bricked it by slowing everything down on the phone.
I guess "it just works" as long as you keep upgrading to their latest. That's true with deprecations in every product line, but it's not something I'd pay a premium for, especially when it doesn't exist.
Not me personally but a close friend I know that works there says morale is at an all time low understandably. Luckily he wasn't fired but a close coworker of his who was the #25th employee of Uber was removed. 6+ years at Uber and was managing and running a team that wasn't deemed essential to Uber core services apparently. Kind sucks but these people are at a position where it shouldn't be difficult to find another position elsewhere.
I had a first time similar related experience with a startup in Tokyo. The company was focused on IoT related projects and started by purely business oriented individuals with not much tech experience. Their strategy was to hire as many "foreign" engineers to focus on the development while they push out for investment and business opportunities. Unfortunately, there was an internal clash between the engineers and the business side over code quality vs just pushing some buggy IoT related application into production which led to over half the engineering team quit in under 6 months I being one of them. Somehow though they are still afloat a year after using the barely working buggy app that we finished before we left.
