2026ix2, Wednesday: Quality. Brand.

One of the things I love about this weird and wonderful job of mine is how you're only as good as the last thing you did.

(Coupled to that is the ever-present experience of thinking when about to do something challenging: this is when I find out whether I can really cut it or not. And doing so with anticipation as well as trepidation.)

I know. For many people, that sounds like a bug, not a feature. But for me, it's one of the many through-lines from my first life as a print reporter to what I do now: the things that really made that trade something I was, not just something I did.

Honestly, it was and is great. That sense that every day you're making your reputation not via who you are, but what you do, what you make. And - critically - that even your errors can be reputation-enhancing, as long as you show you can always learn, and always grow, and always do better tomorrow.

Like I said: mad though it may be, it makes me feel good, and drives me to keep learning.

I'm babbling about this not really because of anything law- or even reporting-related. No. It's because of the minor kerfuffle that's built up around Apple's decision to show adverts in Maps. Thus far in North America only, but I guess we can't be far behind.

I share with many observers (such as John Gruber here and here, and Jason Snell here) a sense of bafflement, bordering on actual distress. Certainly deep frustration. Seriously: why? It can't produce more than a rounding error in terms of revenues. And yet at what cost?

A symptom, I fear, of Apple falling victim still further to the same enshittification that everything else in tech, and frankly elsewhere, seems to suffer from. In economic terms, it makes little sense to an outsider. Apple's reputation is built on making things that just work, that are better in some way, definable or otherwise, than everyone else's stuff. Better, in particular, for users. Unlike free or freemium services, the Apple price trade-off has always been: we sell our products to you. We don't sell you to other people. In a way, it's exactly the kind of internal externality that Apple is meant to avoid - the very thing that the "we only have one P&L, and that's the CFO's" is intended to guard against. Because Services may make money (a bit) by selling ads, to be sure; but at what cost to the beating heart of hardware revenue over time? And to the - sometimes slightly tarnished, but still I think real - privacy promise that Apple's long held out?

Those who would see me as an Apple fanboi (not entirely inacccurate, I'll admit) would probably say: took you long enough to wake up. And Apple's lack of complete immunity to enshittification (or at least to doing things that not only fail to make things better for users, but screw them over) isn't new, I'll acknowledge. Liquid Glass and butterfly keyboards spring to mind. Its consistent refusal to change pricing etc in the app store before it's forced to is another one.

But Apple's "we make things you're actually going to enjoy using" philosophy is a real one. I spent the best part of 20 years working on PCs during the day, work for which I was paid; and then coming home to a Mac I'd paid for myself with a sigh of relief. I've used Android frequently on phones, and simply prefer iOS. And though I've tried other tablets than an iPad, there really isn't a comparison. No point.

And it's worth something real, too. An island where "the money just lets us keep doing the good stuff" in an ocean of "actually, it's all about the benjamins". Not entirely true, I know; but true enough to be worth hanging onto. And one that I hope the arrival at the top of John Ternus (as the soon-to-be ex-boss of hardware engineering; if anything, the joint home with design of Apple's moral compass as far as what it does is concerned), and the ejection - well, departure; although an ejection seat would've been preferable - of Alan Dye as head of human interface design (see above re: moral compass, particularly in re it going astray) will not only maintain, but reinforce.

What does all this have to do with the heading of this post? Well, I've long loved Dorothy L Sayers' detective stories. Her main character, Lord Peter Wimsey, shouldn't work for the 21st-century reader: an aristo, a monocle-wearer, a man constantly accompanied by his loyal valet, someone for whom scarcity is simply unimaginable and in whose world class distinctions are real, and normal, and even natural. But he does, for me at least: partly because, like many other literary creations I truly adore (cf. Sam Vimes, for one), for all his foibles Wimsey respects people for who they are, irrespective of where they're from, so long as they have any integrity at all. In one of the books, Murder Must Advertise, Wimsey steps into a world utterly alien to him: that of a 1930s advertising agency. Alien because in his world, advertising and marketing are irrelevant, because the name on a product isn't what makes it sell. As he puts it:

"One does not—at least, you and I and this gentleman do not—consider the brand to be the guarantee of quality. For us, the quality guarantees the brand."

The quality guarantees the brand. That's why I love the job I do: ultimately, it's not Jeremy Scott-Joynt that people are paying for, it's their experience of what Jeremy Scott-Joynt can do.

And similarly, for Apple. For all its life since the Mac, and certainly since 1997, Apple at its best has been a beacon of "you don't buy this stuff just because it says Apple on it; you buy it because of what the last Apple thing you bought is actually like to use." For all the mis-steps - the blasted sock to put your phone in, for the love of God - and all the let-downs, that's still more true for Apple than for most other mass-market companies. You remember the times when they've sold stuff that boiled down to "shit with a logo on" (you know, like those Tommy Hilfiger jackets people used to wear whose entire back made you into essentially a sandwich board that you'd paid to become, rather than the other way round) because they're unusual. Not because they're normal.

Ads in Maps are shit with a logo on. In fact, they're worse, because they don't do anything for you. Not even a little bit. They're the anti-Apple.

No. Just no.