Comment by krm01

1 day ago

I wonder if there’s a breakdown of their top performing or fastest growing services. It’s interesting how they dont seem to promote the services that much yet are seeing tremendous growth.

Always remember that most of their “services” revenue is the App Store 30% tax on casino games for children, and the commissions for Safari default search engine coming from Google. These two are Apple’s twin licenses to print money, and both of them grow without Apple needing to innovate or really do anything.

App Store grows as the addictive game publishers improve their manipulation skills, and Google’s check grows as browser usage increases. Every time someone types, say, “Citibank” into the search box and doesn’t add .com, Apple earns a tiny payment from Google.

I’m sure they als make a decent chunk of money from iCloud as users who buy base models are almost certainly forced to make use of iCloud Photo Library to free up enough space on the device to even function; but I suspect it’s orders of magnitude less than that.

  • I pay $40/month for Apple One alone, not to mention my various AppleCare subscriptions. Surely they make more money from that kind of service than google search payments.

    • Sure, and I have that Apple One plan too. Certainly from you and me they do. But the sheer number of people doing "searches" (99% of the sites visited from every safari browser is probably doing a "search" to get there) makes the Google search commission so big -- $20 billion per year in 2022 when we found out the figure due to court filings. It would take over 526 million of us - half a billion users - all subscribing to Apple One $38 tier just to equal that number. And I don't think the shift from Google to LLMs for "question asking" has probably put a dent in it, because when I look at how people use their devices, I believe that most searches are done for navigation purposes (people don't like remembering URLs and don't use bookmarks).

  • I should buy a share of AAPL and instigate a shareholder’s lawsuit that argues that calling the App Store baksheesh “services” is misleading.