Summary

Gruber revisits his 2024 coverage of Apple's Taboola deal and confirms his prediction: the partnership made zero improvement to ad quality, variety, or frequency in Apple News. He documents scammy, repetitive ads — including fraudulent 'going out of business' schemes with Chinese-registered domains — and argues that Apple leadership is suffering from a specific cognitive dissonance: they have come to believe the Apple brand confers quality, rather than understanding that quality work is what built the brand. This inversion explains why Apple refuses to offer ad-free tiers — doing so would require admitting the ads make experiences worse, which contradicts their self-image. Gruber concludes that Apple is simply bad at advertising and always will be, because ad incentives are structurally opposed to everything Apple has historically excelled at.

Key Insight

Apple's refusal to offer ad-free tiers isn't a pricing strategy — it's a symptom of institutional delusion: they cannot admit their ads degrade the user experience without shattering the self-image of a company that never makes things worse.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 9

  The obvious truth is that Apple's ads just plain suck.

• 7

  They're conflating cause and effect. The Apple brand stands for high-quality superior user experiences because the devices and software Apple makes traditionally deliver high-quality superior user experiences. The work Apple ships is what makes the brand what it is.

• 8

  It's a textbook case of Upton Sinclair's famous adage: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.'

• 7

  It shouldn't be surprising that they're not good at advertising-based services, because the incentives for advertising-based services are in direct opposition to the incentives for everything Apple actually is good at.

• 7

  If you refuse to admit that the ads make these services worse, you also can't admit that there's a reason to offer an ad-free experience.

• 6

  I have no faith that the ads that Apple is supposedly on the cusp of serving in Apple Maps are going to be good.

• 9

  The ads in Apple News and the App Store can't be detrimental to the user experiences and at times even embarrassingly crude or downright scammy because Apple doesn't ship things that are detrimental to the user experience or embarrassingly crude — and certainly never with even a whiff of scamminess.

Tone

critical, opinionated