Unfortunately even if you're paying for the hardware, and paying monthly for iCloud, and paying 30% of every app and in-app purchase Apple still won't give you an ad-free experience.
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.
On top of that, Apple users tend to be in the upper half of the income distribution - like in the USA iPhones are 55-60% of the market, but that skyrockets to well over 80% in the upper income half.
There's a reason advertisers salivate at that (and why Google gives Apple billions to default to Google search).
The cash brought in by ads is concrete, quantifiable, and can be attributed to specific people. The lost sales and eroded brand trust are almost impossible to measure or attribute. This means it's very easy for businesses to (inadvertently) incentivise managers to destroy brand trust in pursuit of profit.
Nobody's every gotten a bonus for their restrained and tasteful decision not to put ads into something.