Lex on Tech members can submit questions that I answer right here on the site. Reader Geraint asks:
Yes.
My friend Dan Moren’s written a bit on this topic, both at Six Colors and Macworld. Being an Apple fan in 2026 is different from being an Apple fan in, say, the nineties.
The most fundamental change, of course, is that Apple is no longer the underdog. Apple is the alpha, one of the most valuable companies in the world, and almost immune to screwing up: When you have as much money as Apple does, you can afford to make many, many mistakes and still have near-infinite runway.
Apple’s leadership has changed, a few times now, since the nineties.
At its core (ha!), Apple is a company. Companies aren’t your friends; corporations aren’t people. Apple’s loyalty is to its shareholders first. Employees and customers come somewhere after that. Apple has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interests of the company and its shareholders, which of course ultimately means creating more value. That’s the job.
There’s leeway there: Apple can decide that defending privacy or forward-thinking environmentally-friendly policies are good for creating value. Or that creating great products and software are both good for creating more value. I think Apple the corporation does believe these things.
Apple also makes decisions I strongly disagree with: Cozying up to the Trump administration, fighting against developers and whether they owe Apple in certain circumstances in court, raising prices, refusing to bump the base iCloud storage tiers.
I’m not saying any of these decisions is indefensible; I’m saying that they suit Apple’s best interests, and Apple’s shareholders’ best interests (in Apple’s view, anyway); not mine as a customer.
But Apple also makes great hardware and software. I derive joy from using my Mac and iPhone and iPad, and from building apps. What’s more, I derive joy from being part of the Apple community. Friends like Dan and Jason Snell and John Moltz and many others — they’re people I know and befriended because of Apple’s existence, as a unifying fandom for nerds of a certain stripe.
It’s okay to be a passionate Apple hobbyist. It’s harder than it used to be, maybe, but you can love what it means to you to be an Apple user, even if you don’t have the same affection for the company you once did.