People always orient around themselves. People living in Cupertino or Mountainview might say they live in the "Bay Area" but for people living further North in San Francisco or Oakland, they would consider themselves to be living in the "Bay Area" and folk further South to be living in the "South Bay".
This is just semantics.
Of course not; they're already in the Bay Area. People in Palo Alto don't say "I'm going to the Bay Area" when they drive to SF, and people on the Upper West Side don't say "I'm going to New York today" when they take the A train downtown, either. I honestly can't tell whether or not you're trolling, at this point.
With regards to your other point, no, of course I don't think all Apple engineers are second tier, but I do feel that since Bertrand Serlet left, OS X engineering has languished.
Given that I know some competent - but not great - engineers who work at Apple (and they happen to commute) I wonder if the culture at Apple today is more about hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap, rather than hiring great engineers and letting them loose to "think different".
Regarding "great" vs. "competent" engineers: every company needs a mix of them. There aren't enough truly great engineers for even just Apple or Google to be entirely staffed by them, much less all of the other companies out there. So everyone needs to make do with merely competent engineers in some roles.
You mentioned in a sibling comment that the engineers in question "contract at Apple"; here you wonder if Apple is merely "hiring competent engineers to implement a roadmap". But that's exactly what all companies hire contractors for, whereas great engineers who are "let loose to think different" are typically permanent employees.
Check out the reviews of Pages 5, which has been dumbed down. If the vision and future for OS X is to turn it into a Fisher Price OS for the masses, I can see why a great engineer would prefer to work elsewhere and tackle bigger challenges.
http://mjtsai.com/blog/2013/10/23/iwork-13-a-huge-regression...
People you know are delusional. The "Bay Area" includes the peninsula, south bay, east bay, and north bay. Some people throw in Santa Cruz, which might be a bit extreme, but I've never talked to anyone who lived there for an appreciable time period and didn't include Silicon Valley (and hence Cupertino).
> I've met a few people now who are contracted by Apple to work on their customer facing Apps.
You've met a couple of employees (or maybe contractors?), and you believe that they are representative of thousands of technical staff? That says far more about you than it does about anything else.