No. But Apple has a shockingly small number of employees relative to other big software names, and they have had historically had much fewer third-party developers than other platforms.
As a result, they have chosen to consolidate the mindshare onto one memory management technology rather than dilute the talent pool with two competing proposals. Given that iOS is much, much more popular than OS X, they have chosen to standardize on the technology that works best for the popular platform.
I would respectfully have to disagree. I've been programming for about 30 years, but finally broke down and bought my first Mac about a year ago. It's a nice platform, and the native apps are a joy to use, compared to the sludge that most Windows apps are.
Oh, and it lets me do most of what I have been doing on Linux the last 18 years. Not quite everything, but pretty close.
No matter how much you tweak and tune a GC, there are still going to be times when it destroys "locality" in a hierarchical memory system and causes some kind of pause. For a small form entry program, this is probably negligible. As the size of the program and/or its data grows, or the time constraints grow tighter, these pauses will become more and more unacceptable.
Most of my work the last 10 years has been in Java, but the JVM is not the one true path to enlightenment. TMTOWTDI :-)
As a result, they have chosen to consolidate the mindshare onto one memory management technology rather than dilute the talent pool with two competing proposals. Given that iOS is much, much more popular than OS X, they have chosen to standardize on the technology that works best for the popular platform.