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Comment by discordance

12 hours ago

~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...