Apple Now Owns the Page Turn (New York Times)

I don't know if they were/are paid per application, but I read a story from a patent examiner somewhere which indeed mentioned an average time of something like 30 minutes (less than an hour) per patent application was what they got considering the then (5-10 years ago, I think) current workload & staffing.

Of course that average includes patents that can be discarded in 5 minutes, but it also includes patents that come with lots of attached documents that go back & forth through tens of iterations (versions) over several years before they get granted.