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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 th
by hapticmonkey 5mo 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.
- discordance 5mo 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!
- planb 5mo agoServices 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.
- mdorazio 5mo agoNot true. App Store is less than 1/3 of services revenue.
- planb 5mo agoSource? But it‘s true that I forgot about the Google Search deal.
- benoau 5mo agoYou'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-900m-from-generative-ai-apps-in-2025/ https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/19/report-apple-made-roughly-900...
- smt88 5mo agoConsumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.
- tokioyoyo 5mo agoYeah, 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.
- presbyterian 5mo agoAgreed, 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.
- smt88 5mo ago> 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.
- avianlyric 5mo agoWhy are you comparing a single phone manufacturers market position to the market position of an entire OS? iOS vs Android isn’t relevant when discussing hardware. It’s Apple vs Samsung etc. iOS doesn’t need majority market ownership for Apple to completely dominate their hardware competitors in a market.
- carlosjobim 5mo agoBut now you've argued that people are buying Android instead of iPhone just because of social pressure from their peers.
- goalieca 5mo ago> (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.