When the Company Outgrows the Tribe
There is a peculiar grief that comes from watching something you loved become successful. Matt Gemmell captured it well in The Fallen Apple, describing what feels like the slow diminishment of a company that once seemed to understand exactly who it was building for. He is not wrong to feel it. But I think the feeling and the explanation are two different things.
The Apple of 2025 is genuinely different from the Apple of 2001 or 2005. Anyone who spent time in the early Mac web knows that. The keynotes felt more surprising. The software felt more idiosyncratic. The community around it — bloggers, indie developers, power users — felt like participants rather than customers. There was a sense that the people making the products and the people using them were, in some rough way, the same kind of people. That is largely gone now, and the absence is real.
But gone is not the same as fallen.
Scale changes what a company can afford to care about. When you are serving a few million devoted users, you can afford to optimise for delight, for surprise, for the kind of feature that makes a small audience feel genuinely seen. When you are serving a billion people across phones, watches, tablets, cloud services, and enterprise infrastructure, the incentives shift. Reliability matters more than elegance. Regulatory compliance matters more than experimentation. Predictable revenue matters more than philosophical purity. None of that is a moral failing. It is the mathematics of operating at that size.
What the early community experienced as intimacy was partly a function of scale. Apple was small enough that the distance between the company and its most devoted users felt navigable. Developers could influence direction. Writers could shape the conversation. Power users could see their habits reflected in product decisions. As the company grew, that distance widened — not because Apple became careless, but because the centre of gravity moved. The global consumer replaced the Mac enthusiast as the primary audience. When that happens, people who were once near the centre find themselves at the edge, and that repositioning can feel like rejection even when it is simply arithmetic.
This pattern is not unique to Apple. It happens to almost every company that begins as a movement and becomes infrastructure. The early web gave way to platforms. Independent bookshops gave way to chains and then to Amazon. What starts as a community of shared sensibility becomes a service used by everyone, which means it can no longer be built specifically for anyone. The original participants experience this as loss. The broader public experiences it as convenience. Both are correct.
The harder question is whether Apple is making _good_ decisions now, not whether it is making the same decisions it once did. Those are different questions. Large companies make conservative choices. They miss opportunities. They sometimes trade long-term quality for short-term margin. Criticism on those grounds is legitimate and worth pursuing. But record profitability and sustained adoption are not signs of collapse — they are evidence of continued relevance, whatever you think of the aesthetic cost.
Gemmell’s essay is worth reading because it is honest about what the loss feels like from the inside, and that feeling deserves to be taken seriously. Communities of early adopters carry something real: a set of values, expectations, and relationships that shaped what a product could be. When a company leaves that community behind, something is genuinely lost, even if the company itself is thriving.
But perhaps the sharpest truth here is not about Apple at all. It is about what happens when something we encountered as ours becomes everyone’s. The products have not stopped being good. They have stopped being _ours_. And that distinction — between objective decline and the end of a particular kind of belonging — is easy to blur when you are the one who has been left at the edge.
Apple did not fall. It just stopped orbiting the people who first loved it. Whether that is a tragedy depends entirely on where you are standing.
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