Last week, we talked about Mark German's reporting on Apple Maps, adding ads sometime probably

next year. And we got feedback from listener Joe, who basically, he mentioned something that I

meant to bring up last week, which is, will Apple offer an ad-free tier of things like Apple Maps

to Apple One subscribers? So you pay for Apple One to get the full bundle

of Apple services, and theoretically, free of ads. I personally, what I meant to say last week

is that I'm skeptical of this. I don't think it's something Apple will do, honestly, because Apple

wants to have its cake and eat it too. They want to get your subscription money, and they want to

show you ads where they can. And historically, especially in the era of streaming services,

I think what we've seen is companies have realized advertising can be just as lucrative, if not

more lucrative than actual subscription prices. That's why with like Netflix, you see the

standard Netflix tier with ads like $7 a month, but the cheapest

ad free tier is $20 a month. That's how lucrative advertising has been for Netflix.

And I think the same situation probably applies to Apple too. Yeah, you have to think like

the Apple one bundle price only has so much wiggle room in it, right? Because Apple still wants to make money on

that price. And so there's only so many things they can throw into it without putting the

price up to make it more worthwhile, right? And you see this in the price structure. Apple I

premium, the most expensive tier, one of the things it adds is fitness, right? But fitness is like the cheapest thing Apple offers in the whole suite of their content services because you only got to pay for one, you know, LA studio and 10 trainers all year round. Yeah. It's a good service, I'm not saying, but the profit margin on fitness has to be way higher than, for instance, Apple News. So the premium tier has fitness and news in it because the lower profit margin,

the lower margin on news is offset by the higher profit margin of fitness.

And this goes all the way up the scale.

If you put the ad-free tier Apple Maps in there, the couple dollars a month or whatever that Apple thinks it can

extract out of Maps users, they either have to like eat it in the Apple One price or the Apple

one price has to go up, right? And so there's a balancing act of what they want to put in the

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