Well, it’s official and public now: Apple sold PowerSchool to Pearson, a British publishing and curriculum conglomerate. We were given the news on Tuesday by Apple’s CFO, Peter Offenheimer, in a way that one of the engineers aptly described as an “it’s not you, it’s me” breakup speech. Lots of noise was made by Apple brass about how wonderful it will be for PowerSchool, and what great news this is for all of us.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being cynical about the deal. It does make sense for Apple and Pearson. Apple is getting rid of a division that, while profitable, wasn’t really considered part of Apple’s core business of selling snazzy consumer devices, software, and digital content. Pearson acquires one of its competitors, gains our technology, and grows its market share by a significant amount. Win-win, on the macro level.

For those of us down on the PowerSchool cube farm, we all get to keep our jobs. Our CEO is heading up the newly-combined entity, and it’ll be headquartered out of our office in California. These are Good Signs. Still, something of a pall hangs over us, and it’s not just because of the uncertainty that change imparts.

We won’t be working for Apple anymore.

Some of us are Apple fanatics from way back, and are fiercely partisan. Others hadn’t even so much as looked at a Mac before they got here. Pretty much everyone is agreed on one thing though: it was good working for Apple, and we’re saddened by the end of the relationship. Pearson is relatively, well, boring. There’s just no other way to say it. We’re all thinking it, no matter how hopeful we are about the future. Let’s face it, Apple is pretty much defining “cool” in the technology sector these days. The loss of that intangible coolness factor by association, the je ne sais quoi of the Apple mystique, is disheartening. (This is not to say, however, that PowerSchool was all about the bling. Far from it; most people outside school IT departments don’t even know we—or our application—exists.)

But still… we won’t be working for Apple. Sure, we might not have been part of Apple’s core operations, but were nonetheless part of that greater whole; while we toiled away, we were all stoking the same fire, moving Apple’s shiny white plastic and brushed-aluminum ship forward.

Now we watch as that ship pulls away from us, leaving us behind on an unfamiliar shore.

I hope the natives are friendly.