Just my opinion but I don't much mind some advertisements if I feel like they are not impacting my devices' security or my privacy.
I am a huge fan of Apple's new Lockdown Mode - I have it enabled 99% of the time.
Why is selling billions of thousand-dollar devices not enough? Can't they be satisfied with a successful business selling hardware at high markups to repeat customers? Why do they also need to expand into ads and destroy their hard-won reputation of being a premium brand, to milk those few extra cents per user?
New phones are no longer a growth market. Everyone has one, and buying a $1200 phone every year is something less and less people are doing.
If Apple totally trashes their reputation, who are they going to flock to... Google? That is just jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.
For example, I like the idea that Apple remaining insanely profitable doesn’t necessarily mean I need to keep buying new iPhones every 2 years.
It’s much better for consumers (and our planet by the way) if these devices continue to have increasing average lifespan.
Obviously it would need to be in Apple’s best self-interest to invest literally billions of dollars of R&D in order to get these devices closer to a 10 year lifespan than a 2 year lifespan, it’s not going to happen in a capitalist system if it halves their revenue.
For that equation to work out, factoring in increased market share for making a phone so robust and software so un-bloated, I’d say they would need to earn roughly 3-4x the revenue of selling a new device from each user over that 10 year period from higher-margin services instead.
You mentioned Google. I think they are also working hard to find additional income streams. Google has good products in GCP as well as entertainment media like YouTube, YouTube Music, Play books/movies. But they are still too reliant in advertising.
I think Apple will do better than Google in branching out, but to be honest I enjoy both companies products while taking full advantage of Google’s privacy settings, Apple’s Lockdown Mode, etc. if people use Google with default settings, well, that is their decision.
No, capitalism & capitalists are never satisfied. The whole system requires constant growth.