This inspired me to respond because I had sort of the opposite experience.
Your work turns up in real products, but you really have no idea when - you might show up one morning and find that the stuff you were working on has been announced or released. You don't really know except for "reading the tea leaves" and obviously when they put out something like the press event invite from a couple of days ago. I bet no one in the Mac OS group knew that builds of Mountain Lion were being shown to journalists - they just came into work on a regular day and realized it was everywhere.
If you need to know something, sure, you can know it. But it's no fun not getting to know all the stuff you DON'T need to know. Maybe it just wasn't a fit for me - before Apple I was someone who would obsessively ask questions. All the time. Whenever I met someone new (personally or at work), I would ask their ear off because I love to understand in fairly specific detail what problems different types of people solve, how they approach their work, and what they like or don't like about it. Safe to say Apple beat this out of me. I like to understand how what I'm working fits into the bigger picture, and at Apple you basically have to be a VP to get that kind of understanding.
I also came in as an Apple fan first. I loved Apple and its products deeply, so once I arrived I was very interested to find out not only what was going on in my immediate group, but in all parts of the organization. Finally, I thought, the curtain has been lifted and I get to absorb and understand the tools and processes that power this unstoppable force.
No such luck -- and I think it's bad for them. I think it deincentivizes those employees who have been loyal followers of Apple for a long time and are really familiar with the ethos of the company over decades from making sure it stays on the right track and true to itself. Anecdotally, only about one in three current Apple employees really deeply understood or loved Apple before joining. I'm told that during the IT training in the first week, when asked "who here has used a Mac before?", only about half are raising their hands nowadays.
I would think curiosity is a good thing and something you want to encourage in your employees. Instead, Apple's system seems to encourage people who are just clocking in and out for the paycheck and don't care to know or ask how they fit into the bigger picture, or what the bigger picture even is.
tl;dr: The intense compartmentalization and secrecy at Apple are most painful for the people who love the company the most.