Comment by IgorPartola
12 hours ago
Apple is a hardware company with proprietary CPUs and such. They have such a moat that if they open sourced their entire OS stack today nobody would be able to do anything with it except by buying their hardware.
But the issue with the app stores is the app fees. Those must be lucrative enough to want to keep that gate for themselves.
Services are super high margin (twice that of hardware), growing quickly year over year, and now make up a big fraction of Apple's overall revenue. Sadly, I think, the days of Apple having the incentives and motivations associated with being primarily a hardware company are well past us—we're at the stage where hardware and OS product decisions reflect a need to drive services revenue, rather than simply making something great that people want to buy.
App Store revenue is essentially infinite margin. Selling gambling games to children is essentially free money for them.
*skimming off the top from gambling games for children.
They don’t even have to put in the effort of making it.
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> gambling games to children
Essentially the same as giving alcohol to kids at home. That's the parents fault first and foremost.
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Services are the second largest revenue steam for Apple, after the iPhone. All other hardware they make is way further down. There's a relevant discussion at [0].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45764986
And this is why it should be taken away from them. They will make better hardware without it.
I'm not sure if I see how this logically follows? Apple's massive revenue streams have allowed them to develop the A and M series chips, arguably both technological marvels in their own right. I don't see how they would be making better hardware if they had less money to spend on R&D.
They have such a moat that if they open sourced their entire OS stack today nobody would be able to do anything with it except by buying their hardware.
That doesn't make much sense, XNU and the layers above it are very portable, they went PowerPC -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARM64 after all. They also supported multiple different GPUs in the Intel era.
If the entire OS stack was open sourced today, we would have forks running on standard Intel/AMD CPUs in a week. They wouldn't have the same optimized power management, etc. But I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.
macOS/iOS are part of the moat.
> I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.
Given how polished the Linux desktop experience has become and how much software is available (gaming on Proton in particular), I don't think this is true.
If the entire stack would be open sourced there would be ports, but would there be a market for macOS devices without the optimized power management and device integration Apple offers now?
I'm still hoping some other integrated software/hardware company will stand up and offer the same attention to detail as Apple did. Instead of that everybody's actively enshittifying their own products and complaining Apple is earning so much...
Companies have tried to sell Hackintoshes before. There was a market before Apple silicon. There is still some demand it's just nigh impossible to build a modern fully compatible system.
I doubt a knockoff MBP would happen initially but it would absolutely encroach on the Mac Mini.
For the original Macintosh operating system, surprisingly a good amount of demand:
https://youtu.be/P7vvdXzcrFM
> wiping out desktop Linux
Doubt. I couldn't figure out how to do windows management under macOS to save my life. This is so needlessly obscure and inconsistent.
If it was open source, people would make their own window management modifications on top of it.
(I wouldn't call it obscure though, it's pretty much standard WIMP with some differences compared to Windows.)
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Yeah that’s why nobody buys their computers
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Their services revenue this quarter was their second largest business segment (iPhone #1), but experienced more growth than any other segment (~15% iirc, iPhone was more like 6%). Many onlookers see "Services" and think "Oh wow Apple TV and Apple Music must be doing really well", and that's exactly what Apple wants you to think. In reality, these services are doing good, but my understanding is: that category is utterly dominated by tolls. Their toll-taker position in controlling App Store sales, the fees they charge on Apple Pay transactions, and their revenue from their part in the Apple Card system.
Their genuine services, other than maybe iCloud storage, are small businesses. Consider this: Apple reports $28.7B in quarterly services revenue. Spotify reported $3.8B in quarterly revenue directly from their 281M premium subscribers ($4.3B total) (AM has no free tier). Spotify is, in all likelihood, quite far ahead of AM in subscriber counts; estimates put AM at ~100M. AM also gives away a ton of subscriptions likely at a bulk discount (its included with some Chase credit cards, Verizon Wireless plans, etc); it would surprise me if total AM revenue is higher than $1.5B/q.
$20B+ of that service revenue per year is free money from Google.
This is very true, and this is why we need freedom for our phones. Sadly, the best way of running free software on a modern and feature-complete phone at the moment is to buy a Pixel and flash Graphene.
The question is, do you want freedom or do you want market popularity? Because as you said you can get Pixel and use Graphene or Lineage and do whatever you want. But if you want market popularity then that is something that is not the case right now. The overwhelming majority of people do not download and install apps outside the main store fronts.
And how does that freedom help anyone? If your grandparent just uses their phone to make calls, texts and playing Candy Crush then how is software freedom making their experience better? Or are we just imprinting our priorities and desires onto others?
According to the first Google result they had a revenue of 10 billion dollars in app store fees in 2024.