At the end of the day, the engineers that I personally know who contract at Apple are competent but not great. They happen to commute. The two are not related. There is no insinuation in the original post that all engineers who commute are mediocre.

I am however insinuating that the culture at Apple may have changed, which allows merely competent engineers to be hired in the first place, while great engineers like Bertand Serlet leave the company, to the detriment of OS X.

As for the 101, you must be trolling...