‘Always Choose the Good Soap’

Jason Snell: Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products — you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software like so many PCs do. Those are choices Apple has made that cost the company revenue, but they’ve got a bigger purpose. They reinforce the brand. Opting not to add more revenue to the bottom line is a difficult choice for anyone working at a profit-driven corporation. Great minds write about the same topic on the same day. What Snell’s column makes clear is that the incremental revenue Apple is gaining from putting shitty ads in its software comes at a price. They’re withdrawals from Apple’s brand equity. And I would argue that the value they’re detracting from the brand far out-values the dollar amount they’d padding to Apple’s bottom line. It shouldn’t be easy for users to simply imagine obvious ways for Apple’s software to improve. But it’s trivial for any user to imagine an obvious way for the App Store to be better: take out the ads from search results. If there were a preference setting to remove ads from App Store search results, everyone would turn that on.

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Uploaded Jul 28, 2026

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