Comment by hapticmonkey
13 hours ago
Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.
Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.
~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!
Services revenue is mostly just 30% from App Store Sales. This means every time a user clicks a pro account for ChatGPT or Claude on their phone, Apple makes more money than they could make with a self deployed model.
You're not wrong that they collect a ton of rent off AI apps, rumours a few weeks back claimed $900m in fees last year with 75% of that just from OpenAI.
But services revenue is:
- their 36% share of Google Ads for being default search engine, about $21 billion/year of pure profit
- their IAP fees, court testimony reveals 75% profit margin
- their first-party subscriptions, there's an antitrust about iCloud that alleges 52% of iPhone users are on paid plans and that the profit margins are 80-ish percent!
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/19/report-apple-made-roughly-900...
Not true. App Store is less than 1/3 of services revenue.
> (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade.
Pretty sure this is just a hedge or simple research project and not a main bet.
Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.
Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user. Basically everyone around me is the same.
Agreed, I’ve been a loyal iPhone user for a long time, and very few people I know use iMessage. I use it with my parents because they don’t have any other messenger, and they don’t even really know it’s iMessage, they just think of it as texting. Everyone I know is using something else for messages, whether it’s Discord, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, or occasionally Telegram or Snapchat.
In the US it's mostly iMessage, and that includes people who say it's not mostly iMessage.
iPhones are more expensive, on average, for a similar or worse experience. The thing that drives iphone sales is social. People want iPhones because their friends do, and that's a very good reason.
> Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user.
A single anecdote isn't data. You're not a typical consumer.
The only major market where iPhone outsells Android (number of handsets) is the US, and it's because of iMessage. Android is 70% of the world market and dominates LatAm, Africa, and Asia.
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US centric view, which I believe to be wrong. UK is predominantly WhatsApp, and the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones.
Income is a much tighter correlation than messaging platform. Rack up those market shares by phone value and the scales tip even harder.
> the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones
According to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... it's closer to 50/50.
That must be an american thing because I guarantee you that it doesn't mean anything for the rest of the world.
It is, and the iPhone doesn't have overwhelming market share in any other large market, which is my point.
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That is a very US centric opinion.
In other part of the globe iphone users are mostly using whatsapp or Line and couldn't care less about imessage.
And in those countries, iOS has a much smaller market share. You're proving my point.
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I doubt 80% of iphone users would be able to tell you if imessage was on or not.
they might say that some people's messages are green, but not much more.
iMessage is AFAIK only really a big thing in the US.
Canada too.
I only have WhatsApp installed for when I leave the country.
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Yes, and the US is by far Apple's most important handset market. The other iOS-majority countries are small markets for Apple.
I totally buy this as someone located in the US, but what is everybody else using? It can’t be WhatsApp? Is everyone sending all their connection graphdata to Meta?
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No one uses iMessage in my country. Yet iPhones are sought after. Some of us just really like iPhones for the experience - not everything is a conspiracy. People can have different tastes and are more free to choose than people on HN like to believe.
What country?