Always choose the good soap – Six Colors

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By

Jason Snell

July 27, 2026 9:59 AM PT

Always choose the good soap

(Angelo D’Amico/Shutterstock)<br>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 with advertising. The recent release of Apple Creator Studio should’ve been a highlight, because it groups a bunch of useful creative apps in one place for a reasonable price. Instead, its launch was marred by the inclusion of Apple’s free productivity apps in the bundle, requiring users to download new versions and (at least initially) display aggressive subscription promotions in the Numbers, Pages, and Keynote interface.

To this day, you’re confronted with an ad for Creator Studio every time you create a new document in those apps, and their default toolbars contain buttons that won’t work unless you subscribe to the bundle. As a result, Apple has essentially turned its free productivity suite—software that was designed to enhance the inherent value of Apple’s products—into a freemium package with upsell to a creative professional subscription bundle that’s irrelevant (and a terrible value!) for most of its existing users.

There are many more examples. Using notifications to promote subscriptions and badging the Settings app to push AppleCare plans are among the ways Apple has chosen to intervene in the user experience to drive revenue. I’m actually not opposed to the idea that Apple should communicate opportunities for its customers to get more out of their devices—but it should be careful not to cross the line into actively annoying those customers. If someone doesn’t want to see what you offer, you need to accept that and go away—not keep needling them. Apple often falls on the wrong side of that line.

Which brings me back to the hotel soap.

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. I used to be in that position at my former employer, defending the overall product against a constant stream of advertising and biz-dev deal proposals that would add incremental revenue. Believe me, arguing to corporate executives that we should leave money on the table is a deeply uncomfortable role to take on—but it’s vital if you care...