One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not.
Umm... IIUC, Apple already makes billions from Ads. I'll just leave this here:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-08-14/apple-...
Google's revenue is 80% advertising.
Stark difference.
Make no mistake, Apple does not care about your privacy — only about moving the ad money out of Google’s pocket into their own.
I personally think the use of privacy data is a waste of resources, and that companies like duckduckgo have the longer end of the stick. Because it makes more sense to me, that I get advertisements for a robot vacuum cleaner when I'm searching for one, and not the 3 months after I buy one, but then there is a trillion dollar advertisement industry to prove me wrong. So who knows. But what pisses me off is that companies sell you a product, and then also include advertisement and privacy data harvesting in it, like that Samsung TV article that was on here recently. Or how Windows "home or whatever the non-enterprise edition is called" now sometimes installs pre-installers for things like candy crush or Minecraft without asking you to do so... Like what the hell?
I don't want you to read this as a defence for google, but at least they are sort of honest about the evil they do.
I'm not sure any of these sleazy moves will have the desired outcomes for these companies. I don't want to use linux, I did once, but I like my technology to work right out of the box with no effort to make it so or to maintain it, which is why I'm in the Apple ecosystem these days, but the ways things are heading, I think the only future will be linux, and trying to find appliances that aren't add-infested.
1 - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1330127/apple-ad-revenue...
Why play silly games to make 4 billion dollars seem small?
I could play this game in the other direction and say "Apple generates more money from ads now than 99% of the companies ever make over their entire existence"
In truth, 4 billion dollars is a lot of money.
More to the point of this discussion, when you ask them, they want it to be a very significant part of their business. They talk about it on earnings calls all the time! It's not like they are hiding it!
Which sort of totally blows up the idea that they don't care.
You said they do not.
"One of these companies profits by the proliferation of ads and the other does not."
That was wrong. They make a lot of money from it and they have said it is an important part of their future.
Rather than just say you were wrong, you instead try to paint it as not mattering by using percentages, when again, it is a lot of money and apple themselves say it matters a lot
Just accept that what you said was mistaken, and do better next time. What you are doing now just makes you look bad and unable to learn and grow.
However, the point has always been about the comparison between Google and Apple. Given that their total revenues are of different size, how can we reasonably compare them?
What if we add a 3rd competitor to the arena? Let’s look at Outbrain. They’re a digital advertising marketplace w/ $256M annual revenue. By your argument, $256M << $1B — therefore we should take Apple to care more about their advertising business than Outbrain do about theirs?
Apple is rapidly running out of growth room in new physical people to sell phones to, and is starting to significantly switch focus to new ways of extracting rent from existing customers through "services" and similar.