I think being wildly successful has changed Apple. I don't think those changes predict doom, though. Apple strikes me as a very strategic business now, whereas it used to have a low-key, nuanced feel, both in its culture and the way it approached products. I thought it was ironic that Phil Schiller would judge Instagram as having jumped the shark for expanding to Android. The big elephant in the room he was in when he wrote that is that Apple was a nearly bankrupt company kept survived by a niche group of cult-like users at one point. Apple in mindshare at that point existed mostly as a community of people extolling its features to anyone who would listen. And the way in which Apple exists now couldn't be any different. The very niche creative markets that saved Apple (and which Apple thanked in its Think Different ads) are the ones feeling disenfranchised. That original community has been replaced with the entire world. The bigger Apple has gotten the less interesting it has become. Its priorities have changed. Apple used to want to keep a hold on creatives and education. Now they want everyone. Not the computer for the rest of us. The computer for everyone. Even not so long ago, maybe in 2000 or so, I remember flying on a plane with an iBook. You actually were different back then using a Mac. Now that smartphones are starting to outsell feature phones, I'm on the tipping point, and may upgrade to an iPhone when the next one comes out (I've never had a "smart" phone before). But it's not special. It's not being part of a community. It's being part of the herd. I don't mean that in a bad way. It's just not a way that's as interesting to me as Apple and its products were in the past. It feels like it would be akin to subscribing to AOL back in the 90s. It's not bad. It's just not different.
