Identical story for me : left Apple after >6 yrs in hardware, parallelizing optimizing compiler history, excellent reviews, impossible to find transfers internally to leverage grad experience, and internal rules were forcing stagnation, so I left, and don't regret it, though believe in Apple long term too.
I really want Apple to succeed. My experience was they genuinely had their hearts in the right place and I want to be able to buy high-quality, privacy-conscious hardware and software, something of a rarity these days.
That perception means they risk to lose real market share if they get caught doing something shady. Which means they don't do shady things in my experience.
I don't want to turn this into a tired apple-vs-windows thread, so if you can't see why Apple's lack of ads on their desktop is indicative of a fundamentally different view of their users, and a selling point for me, you are free to do so. I see a difference worth paying for (and you are free to call me a sucker I guess).
