Their execs are not above lying under oath.
I hardly believe that a wealthy continent with a population of 450 million is just 7% of their revenue.
I hardly believe that a wealthy continent with a population of 450 million is just 7% of their revenue.
Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence.
It was taken out of context by some random blogger, whereas the gp was implying company executives were lying. My point that we should trust company executives over random internet commenters still holds.
No you. You're well aware that wasn't my point and are trying to put words in my mouth in a pathetic attempt to save face.
> After all, you chose to believe the random blogger before.
I made no such implication. In fact I specifically quoted the part that I was responding to.
> "Given the threat of securities fraud lawsuits, I'm liable to believe them over some random commenter casting doubt with zero evidence."
That was your statement, but - surprise - no exec made the claim that you chose to believe. And if you had thought for 10 seconds you'd have realized that no such claim could have been made because the figure is clearly non-sensical. Oh, and US execs fairly routinely lie, both in court and outside of it. The fact that they get away with it is not proof that they're not doing it.
I suggest you read over the comment chain more carefully and note the authors. I jumped in at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45405359 and was specifically objecting to the part of the comment that was claiming the executive was lying with no evidence. I made no such claims or arguments based on the 7% figure.
--- start quote ---
Apple willfully violated a 2021 injunction that came out of the Epic Games case, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in a court filing on Wednesday.
She wrote that Apple Vice President of Finance Alex Roman “outright lied” to the court about when Apple had decided to levy a 27% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store.
“Neither Apple, nor its counsel, corrected the, now obvious, lies,” Rogers wrote, saying that she considers Apple to “to have adopted the lies and misrepresentations to this Court.”
Rogers added that she referred the matter to U.S. attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/30/court-finds-apple-executive-...
--- end quote ---
Apple's execs literally lie under oath in a court of law. I trust them about as far as I can throw them. They are the same people claiming they don't know if AppStore is profitable or not.
Leaning on GDP as this all-encompassing metric is rather absurd, GDP was adopted because it's an easy metric to calculate, not because it provides the most insights on how life is at some place on Earth.
As opposed to comparing a country of 340M with countries with populations anywhere between 33k to 143M?
You could compare the USA to Switzerland or the Netherlands on a per-capita basis or you could pick Romania or Bulgaria and come away with a completely different impression. The main difference is that countries that have been living under the Russian boot for 50 odd years are still recovering and the remainder is far wealthier than the USA and has a smaller wealth gap between rich and poor. This goes in particular for Germany which is still to this day spending large amounts of money to fund the recovery of the eastern part of Germany, but fortunately, unlike Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltics they have a large enough industrial base to be able to do so. To lump that all together makes zero sense and shows a lack of appreciation of both history and statistics.
You can make the same granularity arguments at the country level as well, for instance Germany vs California or Missouri. Does that mean cross country comparisons are bunk as well? What makes "country" the level of subdivision that's acceptable compared to neighborhood, city, county, state, country, or continent?
But EU countries are closer to US states, except that any two US states are still far more homogeneous than any two EU countries are.
One good basic principle for arguing about stuff is to agree on the meaning of certain words. If you want to compare countries then do so. If you want to compare states with countries, you're welcome to do so too, but you have to take into account the whole range then. But you can't just lump 27 countries on a pile, compute an average and draw a conclusion when comparing it to a single continent sized country.
Besides that, if you take out California the US picture skews downwards considerably, so on that scale other US states have their work cut out for them. No need to compete with Switzerland or the Netherlands for GDP, compete with California first. And that whole discussion still ignores massive wealth generated in China, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and other places.
The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
>...
>The whole idea that you can just collapse a very complex comparison to a single number and call it a day is fatally flawed.
So you reject being able to compare EU member countries to either US (as a whole) or US states?
France? Their debt is killing their country and causing escalating political crises.
Germany? Energy costs are killing their competitiveness. Hard to compete with energy costs of $0.44 per kWh on average; before labor costs.
Italy? Need I say more? Their economy is notoriously stagnant.
The remaining 24 EU countries make up less than 50% of the EU's GDP. Meanwhile, US and EU GDP went from almost 1:1 in 2008, to 1:0.65 and still declining.
To give you a sense of how severe Germany's problems are, the US state of Mississippi is almost ready to pass Germany's GDP per capita.
I've actually lived on both sides of the Atlantic. And there is wealth on both sides and there is poverty on both sides. But the gap between rich and poor is much more pronounced on the US side than in the EU. Energy costs are a small fraction of the total expenses. Mississippi is not a good comparison to Germany (last I checked half of Mississippi was not living under the russian boot for 50 years) and if you just stare at the GDP you will miss a lot of quality-of-life indicators that would make me choose to live in Germany long before I would want to live in a backwater state in the USA. And that's assuming the USA will survive the current onslaught on its institutions.
So stop bullshitting and start thinking about what the real world differences are between countries and then strive to improve the one you can have an effect on rather than just seeing this as a numerical game of put-downs that make absolutely no sense at all.
2. None of that says that the EU isn't rich
3. None of that proves that the bullshit about revenue
Do you know how I know that? Because that "7%" comes from this quote: "Just to keep it in context, the changes apply to the EU market, which represents roughly 7% of our global App Store revenue."
App Store revenue is not all of Apple's revenue. Oh, and those same execs claim they don't even know if App Store makes money or loses it, so how would they know.