Apple's stance on privacy is making a virtue out of necessity.
[1] Yes, yes, I know: iAd. But how well did that work?
There are reports that Apple has an internal committee, including a high level executive, dubbed their "privacy czars" which are required to unanimously sign off on any instance of user data collection, and this committee has actively limited products like Siri over concerns [1]
There's also the San Bernadino customer letter, which has become a defining point in their privacy history [2]. They didn't have to publish that letter; they could have fought it privately or not fought it.
There's really no fundamental reason why iAd couldn't have become a more powerful revenue generating part of their platform. They sell enough iPhones to reach a broad market. But, per [1], reports say that the team ran into internal privacy concerns which constantly forced limiting its capabilities.
Apple is fundamentally different, in ways that can't solely be explained by their product history and revenue sources. Companies like HP and Samsung make consumer hardware, but also generate revenue by selling their customers' data to third parties. Its clear to me that Apple does consider Privacy a revenue-generating product that they sell.
Of course, you can argue that maybe they wouldn't take that stance if they weren't so successful in hardware; that Privacy is a privilege afforded to them because of their success, and less successful companies need that advertising revenue. But now we're arguing hypotheticals, and I'm not going to partake in that.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-encryption-privacy-...
Maybe iAd could have performed slightly better if certain policies had been different. But iAd still had to compete with Google and Facebook whom by virtue of reaching effectively everybody, offer a much more attractive value proposition to most advertisers. Apple simply can't compete with that. And every decision Apple would have to make in order to be more competitive would be at cost of harming the user experience of their products, ie. the very thing that makes them able to charge a premium in the first place.
Of course, you can argue that maybe they wouldn't take that stance if they weren't so successful in hardware
That's not the argument I'm making. At all. My argument is that advertising as a business model is fundamentally incompatible with selling premium hardware products. To be succesful at one means making strategy choices that prevents you from succesful at the other.
May you please elaborate on this > Apple is fundamentally different.
What you said is just a little confusing considering that they all (the companies you mentioned) manufacturer hardware in some capacity.
>advertisers became increasingly perturbed that Apple refused to give them access to the wealth of data iAd had on its consumers from Apple's hundreds of millions of iTunes accounts. And it moved slowly to keep up with the latest ad-tech developments, such as cross-device retargeting.
Stefan Bardega, media agency ZenithOptimedia's chief digital officer, told us: "iAd has long been a story of unfulfilled potential. Apple has unique customer-level data that is hugely interesting to advertisers but has struggled (despite talented sales teams) to access that data in a way that doesn't conflict with the core business."
Another media-agency director who asked not to be named told us iAd got little support from the wider Apple organization
He said: "For me, they never understood that they needed to behave like a media owner, rather they could go it alone charging what they wanted, not sharing data, no third-party tracking
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-apple-is-pulling-direct-s...
For instance:
>Apple doesn’t like to hand over information about its users, not even to benefit its own business. When the iAd team wanted to use information about users’ iTunes purchases to target ads, Apple execs said no way.
https://www.macworld.com/article/3046539/privacy/how-iads-cl...