Some of the most insightful and succinct commentary on the whole Antonio Garcìa Martìnez debacle comes from an ungulate with a Classic Mac for a head:

the Macalope believes Apple should not have hired García Martínez only to fire him. He believe it never should have hired him in the first place.

I'm not going to go over all of the many (many, many) red flags about this person's opinions that should have at the very least triggered some additional scrutiny before hiring him. The reaction from Apple employees was entirely predictable and correct. Even if the misogynistic opinions expressed in his public writing were exaggerated for effect, as he now claims, there would always be a question mark around his interactions with female employees or those from minority backgrounds. At the very least, that would be enormously disruptive to the organisation.

Leaving that aspect aside for a moment: even if this had been someone with the most milquetoast opinions possible (and no NYT bestselling book in which to trumpet them), it's still not great that Apple was looking for someone with his specific professional experience — honed at Facebook.

This particular hire blew up in Apple's face — but it's extremely concerning for Apple users that they were actively recruiting for this type of experience in the first place.

I'll lay my cards on the table: I dislike the idea of search ads as a category, especially in the App Store. We can argue the merits of allowing apps to "jump the queue" of results for generic searches, but as it is today, you can buy yourself into a position ahead of your competitor even for direct searches on that competitor app's name. Where is the value to users in that?

Display ads in Apple News or Stocks, which are the other two Apple properties discussed, might be acceptable — as long as they are not too intrusive. I don't have as much of a philosophical issue as some do with Apple using first-party tracking data within iOS, precisely because those data are not available to other parties or to other platforms. It's easy to opt out of Apple's tracking, simply by not using those apps, and ads from there won't follow me around the rest of the web.

The lesson I hope that Apple takes away from this whole situation is not "don't hire people with big public profiles" but "users really hate sleazy adtech". I would hate for Apple to go the way of YouTube, which is becoming unusable due to ad load. I understand that Apple is trying to boost its Services revenue, and App Store search ads are a way to do that, but if it makes my user experience worse, that's a problem. Apple products command a premium in large part because of how nice they are for users; anything that undermines that niceness weakens the rationale for staying in the Apple camp.