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Comment by rafaelmn | Hacker News Reader

A large % of their revenue comes from app store/services and they have incentives to lock you into the ecosystem, sell you digital shit and take a cut off of everything.

I saw an ad for apple gaming service in my iphone system settings recently !

That's not to say that Google isn't worse but let's not pretend Apple is some saint here or that their incentives are perfectly aligned with the users. Hardware growth has peaked, they will be forced to milk you on services to keep growing revenue.

Personally I'm looking forward to Steam Deck, if that gets annoying with SteamOS - it's a PC built for Linux, there's going to be something available.

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True. The best option currently is to buy an Nvidia Shield TV, unlock the bootloader and install a custom Android ROM. The hardware is great, and if you install a custom ROM, you have more freedom than Apple TV will ever give you.

Ads are only 2-3% of Apple's revenue, while Google is ~75%.

The comment about the ad wasn't about the ad istelf. It was an apple ad for an apple service, so they didn't make any money at all on the ad. The remark was about the service Apple was pushing, and just how intrusively.

Oh but they did achieve a financial good. They saved having to pay another company to place that ad. Therefore, they made more money, eg more profit.

Correct, and didn’t sell your data to do it. I’m okay with that. If I trust Apple with basically my life stored on their phone and in their cloud, and processing payments for me, and filtering my email, and spoofing my mac address on networks (and,and,and), it seems foolish to be worried about them knowing what tv shows I like to watch at night too. At least to me. It’s gonna be a sad day when Tim leaves and user privacy isn’t a company focus anymore.

But the comment OP was replying to was about their ad services and what incentive the company has to operate in good faith or risk impacting sales to the majority of their business.

Services are 25% and are the only one growing/they can grow - that means all focus is going to be on expanding that revenue = enshitification.

Hardware is now purely a way to get you on to the app store - which is why iOS is so locked down and iPad has a MacBook level processor with toy OS.

If you stop looking at the marketing speak and look at it from a stock owner perspective all the user hostile moves Apple is double speaking into security and UX actually make a lot more sense.

Hardware is still 3x the revenue of services, and though it has a lower margin is the bulk of the companies profit. Apple was 3% of the PC market in 2010 and is 10% today, while Android is 75% of the global cellphone market - there's plenty of room for growth in hardware... if you stop looking at the marketing speak, whatever that means.

I don’t see how this really changes the underlying problem of the device pays on you and then they sell that information to the highest bidder? I’m not reaching for a financial report to fix that.

Apple doesn't sell information, they sell access to eyeballs. Quite a big difference. The whole point of first OPs point was that ad revenues to Apple are not worth hurting the other parts of their business built around privacy. Pointing out that Apple shows ads for owned services within their own OS isn't a case otherwise.

Apple absolutely does allow wholesale data harvesting by turning a blind eye to apps that straight up embed spyware SDKs.

This isn’t some hypothetical or abstract scenario, it’s a real life multi billion dollar a year industry that Apple allows on their devices.

You can argue that this is not the same thing as the native ad platform that they run and I’d agree but it’s also a distinction without a meaningful difference.

All you've done is move the goal posts, and it's not even ads related. I'm not entirely certain what you're arguing, other than having some feelings about Apple.

Good luck getting widevine decryption to work without a locked down OS...

It’s worked on Linux for a while, though it is limited to 720p I believe.

Why would torrents use widevine?

Like another comment mentioned I'm ready to go back to torrenting. Im currently paying for 4 streaming service subscriptions (if you count YouTube premium) where I have super segmented and annoying search UX, and Apple won't even let me pay for their service in my EU county (Croatia). And the DRM story is ridiculous. I'll just setup ARR stack and have a better experience than I can pay for - for free.

I'll still keep buying stuff on steam.

Imagine wasting CPU time with that, instead of watching a mkv file with mpv.

Why would anyone pay to be treated like shit.

Convenience. Always comes back to convenience.

Jellyfin + Arr stack would take a couple of hours to setup and cost $10/month for a seedbox in Europe, but it's not as convenient as downloading an app and logging in.

If it was just one app or even two I would agree but there's : - Netflix - HBO max - Sky Showtime - Amazon Prime - Apple TV+ - Disney+

This is just the stuff I watched this year.

Add in all the region locks, also not all the services having rights to local dubs despite them being available (more for children's stuff but still relevant, Disney+ is unusable for me because of this)

Netflix used to have a catalog worth keeping the subscription on, nowadays I maybe get to watch something once a quarter and keep it on for kids stuff.

Streaming is not convince anymore it's a shitshow.

I think a jellyfin/ARR/Seedbox setup is going to be the solution this year.

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