Glenn Fleishman writing for Six Colors: Can We Still Love Apple? Should We Ever Have?

Maybe it is the right time for this love affair to come to an end. Not the end of my love for what I can do with Apple stuff, but creating boundaries, something good for any relationship. From Tim Cook down, executives—Schiller excepted—have proven themselves unworthy of our trust. As shepherds of the company, they have revealed themselves. I may still love the concept of Apple, but certainly the company no more.

This rings very true to me. It's the dichotomy of having a strong emotional connection to the products that a company makes without thinking about the company in those same terms. As I wrote last year:

I’m sure Apple will continue to be very successful for many years to come and I expect to buy many products in the future as well (after all, Microsoft and Google don’t feel much better). I’ll surely even give some of those products glowing reviews on this very blog. And yet, I do wonder if the Apple enthusiast crowd as we know is in permanent decline.

That piece was about how the Apple relationship with its fans was always different than most other companies and that relationship was feeling more bog-standard transactional. In the year since then, I really think that piece holds up in terms of predicting the vibe shift in the Apple enthusiast community that's occurred since then.

I'm absolutely looking forward to WWDC because it's where I'll get to see how the products in my life are going to get better in the coming year, and I'm excited because it's a unique time where everyone in my Apple-centric online circles is particularly locked in and chattering all about nerdy stuff. It'll be fun, it'll be exciting, but it won't be quite what it once was.

Near the end, he said this, which I resonated with as well:

We are often more frank about things we love in describing their flaws than those we hate because we care enough to want them to improve.

There are so many topics that I never discuss on this blog. It's not because I think they're perfect and free from criticism. It's more that I don't think about them enough to have a strong enough opinion to share anything here. I feel like a cliché parent here, but truly, I'm critical because I care.