The old Apple would've pitted two (much smaller) teams against each other. Not sure if the company culture really aligns with that type of structure now, but it's a big assumption that 300 people would all be a single team/org.
When you say "old apple" you're referring to the early 80s Apple where Steve Jobs pitted his Macintosh team against Wozniak's Apple II team to near disastrous results.
Jobs referred to the Mac team as "artists" and the Apple II guys as "bozos"
The company almost collapsed under the insane price of the gen 1 mac ($2,495, or nearly $8000 today) which lacked a desperately needed cooling fan and also didn't have color graphics.
I'm not sure if Jobs kept doing that after he came back in the late 90s, but that practice was generally not very effective from a mangerial perspective.
I imagine they are actually referring to the internal competition Jobs orchestrated leading up to the introduction of the iPhone, which I've never heard described as "disastrous" though plenty of people's feelings were presumably hurt.
And although we cannot really know how much that internal competition contributed to iPhone's success, I think we can imagine that if Apple had shipped an iPod control interface (wheel and click button) with a phone inside it, it would have been nowhere near as successful as it was.
