Always Choose the Good Soap

(Angelo D’Amico/Shutterstock)

I’ve been thinking about soap again.

Back in February I wrote about an Apple-related revelation I had while washing my hands on vacation:

We stayed at a nice hotel rather than the less-nice-but-cheaper VRBO condo rental we usually do. Because I’m me, I started thinking about Apple. Like Apple, the nice hotel’s brand promise is that it’s a nice hotel. If the hotel didn’t clean its rooms well, didn’t provide soap that smelled nice, didn’t maintain the in-room refrigerator, didn’t clean the swimming pool, it would probably decrease its expenses and increase its profit margin. But over time, it would lose its niceness and become a lousy, overpriced hotel.

Earlier this month, John Gruber wrote about how he hopes incoming Apple CEO John Ternus can perform a bit of a reset on Apple’s advertising strategy. In recent months Apple has announced that it’s adding ads to Apple Maps, and (as John has documented) it’s allowed incredibly low-quality, scammy ads to infest Apple News.

While Apple can spin adding ads to Apple Maps as a revolutionary new way for businesses to be discovered, it’s telling that its initial announcement was hidden inside a press release about an entirely different product, and introduced as “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps.” Those choices show that this isn’t something Apple is actually proud of—and that the people in charge of communicating and explaining Apple’s decisions to the world are at odds with those who are making the decisions about expanding revenue.

Apple also recently expanded App Store ads, creating more clutter at the top of App Store search results. It similarly pitched this as an opportunity for developers—but of course, it’s really an opportunity for developers to take a portion of the money they make from the App Store after Apple’s cut and hand it right back to Apple so that their apps don’t become invisible. What a racket.

But Apple’s approach to grinding out additional revenue doesn’t stop…