I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams

> Both sides spending billions on marketing would result in roughly the same outcome as both sides spending nothing on marketing

This is an assumption not backed by data. But its pretty much impossible to truly test this hypothesis at any real scale. What data we do have is if many brands stop advertising when they used to do advertising, they tend to start to lose sales. But, as you point out, their competitors didn't necessarily reduce advertising as well, its not testing "what if everyone cut advertising".

> But if your product is so great, why haven't I heard about it via things like independent reviews or personal recommendations already?

Its an assumption these people would have even found the product in the first place, or were willing to give it a try, or even know the product category or type exists in the first place, and that this organic growth would have happened fast enough to keep the product alive. If everyone is basing their decisions off word of mouth, are there really going to be enough people in your network to buck the trend and give a scrappy new competitor a go and have their opinion make decent enough waves?

A world without any advertising at all seems to me to be a place where entrenched names in markets end up dominating based purely on people practically never finding the competitors. They become the default, the go to. This still largely happens in this over-marketed world today though, I do agree, but I think that's more of over-consolidation of producers and distributors having an outsized say on what we see in a lot of physical stores.

That world without any advertising also leads to some things not being made that would have otherwise existed, things that people generally like. Lots of magazines and other publications practically live off some amount of marketing, and they largely exist as a format for people to go see what's happening in a given industry. Lots of things like sports leagues/teams rely on sponsorships. Would there be Formula 1 racing if they didn't have those corporate sponsors?

I do agree especially internet advertising is largely destroying the internet. I don't understand how anyone uses mobile web pages without an ad blocker these days. Its absolutely terrible looking at anyone else's phones that doesn't block the ads, every page is more ad than content. We've definitely gone too far.

After Jobs passed away Tim Cook failed to manage that tension productively and was put in a position where he had to choose between Ive and Forestall. He chose Ive, which in itself was probably the right choice, but there was nobody with Forestall’s clout to temper Ive’s more wanky tendencies.

Much of the other stuff people complain about is kind of just the reality of being a company that sells to millions or tens of millions to being a company that sells to hundreds of millions or close to a billion customers. A lot of the charm and whimsy gets harder to sustain. I’ve long felt that Apple needs to just do a Toyota/Lexus sort of split and have a second nameplate for doing more avante garde, quirky, and lower volume hardware and software projects.

My honest take on it is that it's the payment companies that are complacent here - they're just allowing payment processing for anyone now up to a certain amount before doing proper diligence. The fact these chinese vendors can spin up a website, get payment processing, verify an ads account and buy advertising shows that many compliance functions are being skipped (or are complicit) in this.

It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it - Apple's contract likely puts verification on Taboola's plate, which is likely not being done per their own "controls" process, or is itself being automated (poorly). Taboola is getting paid because they're running these ads and charging for them, the vendors are being paid because they're drop shipping temu garbage that doesn't resemble their AI ads (since taboola isn't checking this at all) and getting away with it for a few months by long shipping times and delaying refunds/chargebacks long enough to get paid, and the payment processors (paypal, apple pay, google pay) are all making money on their obscene 1%+ processing markups, and have special "group" programs where a company can underwrite their own merchants provided they follow guidelines (compliance offloading). Visa/Mastercard are offloading their compliance duties to the payment processors until they get a formal complaint or chargeback/refund spike over a certain ratio (where they issue a fine and seize processing volume - which is also income for them).

btw if you want to be 100% sure something is a scam - check the iframe url on the credit card input form on the checkout page - on mustylevo.com its https://cashiers.myshopline.com/pci-sdk/v3/iframe.html?merch... which is hardly a name brand ecom platform - they have a "shopify-like" checkout but that isn't shopify (props to shopify/shop pay - they've been very quick to kill these kind of scams on their platform despite it losing them some fees).

So yeah - everyone involved in this is making money and is complicit through their lack of process.

However, I’ve been subscribed to it since its inception because it is the best way to have games that my kid can play without shady ads or engagement practices.

I know that is not going to last, as my kid is now a pre-teen and likes other types of games (like Hollow Knight) that are not available on Apple Arcade.

But the current state of the gaming industry is terrible, especially on mobile. Indy companies producing games like Dead Cells, Hollow Knight, and Stray are good, and there is the extremely rare case of Larian. But other than that, the market is full of dark-UX patterns to promote app purchases. Mobile apps are a minefield of gacha games that should be forbidden for kids.

This hardly an original sentiment, but when Steve Jobs died. Jobs was not perfect, but he believed they were there to make great products, had good taste with obsessive attention to detail, and was pretty much omnipotent in the company. I'm sure there are people with many of these traits in Apple, but not all of them together.

Their first new hardware release was the Apple Watch, which is a confused product, with too many functions on launch, and a poorly thought out two button + scroll wheel + touch screen interface (I still don't really know which button does which). And don't get me started on that ridiculous solid gold version.

You can still see the old Apple in there (look at their hardware!), but it's fragmented and not all pulling in the same direction.