I have a lot of thoughts about this. The number one thing is that you are only _partially_ correct about Apple. Apple is very (very) siloed, by design. So there are very different cultures between product groups.

Apple Maps, for example, was initially much like other Apple products; it was design-centric. And it failed miserably. Why? Because maps and navigation are DATA products. Now, they run hundreds of A/B tests and many other sources of data driven. Similarly, Siri is very data driven. iTunes/app store are also quite data-driven.

Interestingly, when I was there, someone told me "why do we need to A/B test things, we're just supposed to _know_ what people want." He was being tongue-in-cheek, but expressing an attitude that was endemic at the time.