highly-specific minority groups are so awesome
This is why. Most of those "nearly impossible" job "openings" are posted only because they are required to post them because they want to sponsor an employee for his greencard, and this required proof that they could not find a local to fill the position. So to avoid having to interview a lot of applicants, they make the job requirements so specific that only a few people would be a perfect match. Their immigrant employee being the best fit of course.
I saw this firsthand when I was a contractor at a large company in the 90s. The IT director already had a team of programmers and network guys in the Mexico branch that he wanted to bring over. For the sake of legality he placed ads looking for someone to fill these positions and, suffice to say, no one was qualified so he brought his own people over.
There's also a small risk this could backfire on Apple. Apple's fans and customers could feel bad about what happened, and punish Apple for it. Apple is acting just like you say, smug and self-righteous, and that too could become part of this issue which comes back to haunt them. I doubt this though. Their customers probably will never notice, and that's a shame.
I doubt it as well. In the ultimate case of irony, Apple fans are no different than the people under Big Brother's rule in the 1984 Macintosh commercial. They will buy and worship anything Apple regardless of what they do. They will be lining up like sheep to buy the latest iPhone, price be damned, because Apple had the courage to include an innovative new feature that Samsung introduced on their phones a year of two before. And a lot of the Apple users I know look down their noses at anything that doesn't have their precious logo on it. I have nothing against Apple products, still have a G5 somewhere in my house and owned an iPad and iPhone for a couple of years. It's the brainwashed users that get on my nerves.
The rate at which a disease spreads through a corn field is a precise measurement of the speed of blight.