Noted on the skunkworks thing. I do think in general though that managers do fairly well at leaving engineers alone at Google; the big company feel seems to come from engineering inertia a lot - inflexible coding standards, groupthink on which technologies to use, etc.

Mostly though I was hoping for a little clarification from the parent poster of why Apple should feel like a small company more than Google does - both would seem to be great places to work, but I wouldn't expect either to feel small.