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Comment by supernes | Hacker News Reader

How long until they make the argument that they're entitled to 30% of your salary because you use Apple hardware to do your work?

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But what about my banking app! I think it’s only fair Apple take 30% on every transaction I make. After all they put in a huge amount of work validating and making sure my banking app is safe and functional.

Edit: Maybe I am greedy now, but it would be nice if large transactions like say buying a house only would cost me a 15% transaction fee to Apple.

Large transactions are riskier, let’s give them 45%. After all, I’d really hate to see their margins suffer.

I worry about their finances

Who's downvoting this? When you think online sarcasm is so obvious that no-one could believe it, someone's always there to prove otherwise

Maybe because its not really contributing anything new to the discussion?

Visa/Mastercard take like 1 or 2%. That's why they cannot compare to Apple...

If they tried to take significantly more, cash would be a lot more popular.

Yet Apple can get away with taking 30% and companies still accept this and push their apps rather than websites.

> Yet Apple can get away with taking 30% and companies still accept this and push their apps rather than websites.

companies and users!

Visa/MasterCard take like 0.3% the rest of the interchange fee goes to the issuing and acquiring banks.

We just got layers and layers of entrenched middlemen (middle corporations) everywhere

Think about it this way: without the app, 100% of your savings would be inaccessible, so it would be only fair if apple took 30% of them...

They must be looking at the revenue Claude Code is making on Mac and thinking “Why aren’t we getting 30% of that?”

Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.

Developers are a tricky market for this because they could realistically move to different platforms if stuff like this started to happen. Or at least work on remote machines.

If gaming on Macs ever became popular though this would be a real risk.

Apple fans on the other hand are not a tricky market. They swallow whatever Apple gives them.

It doesn't matter if they are developers or not.

I'm not sure Claude Code is making enough for Apple to take notice & drastically alter their CLI like that? CC has 100-150k users across all platforms, paying $200-1200/yr each. Even if every developer is on the top tier Max plan, and on MacOS, that's $180mn in revenue at Anthropic. So even in the most optimistic scenario, that's only ~$50mn revenue for Apple at a 30% take.

That pales in comparison to the hardware & subscription revenues Apple brings in by being a dev-friendly OS.

Source for the numbers? I am asking since Anthropic's revenue is 5+ billions, I'm guessing it's mostly from developers.

Claude code reached $1B in six months in early Dec and given what I am seeing on ground, I wouldn't be surprised if just in last 2 months after that their revenue grew by double.

[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-acquires-bun-as-cla...

There is a $2400 plan as well.

Presumably if you buy an AI subscription through an iOS app you also have to pay 30% Apple tax. Nice work for them.

It does work like that.

For me personally, I have used this method to spend my Apple gift cards purchased on a discount. Effectively I got a Claude subscription at 15% off. (You could argue this only works because OpenAI/Anthropic charge the same price across web/mobile, and I agree.)

So, as much as I despise Apple's business model, in some sense I have directly benefitted from it (other than stock price).

I would expect also that there is a broader revenue sharing agreement for both being a system-integrated search engine and "world knowledge" chatbot (Google and OpenAI being the respective defaults)

> Wouldn’t be surprised if macOS starts locking down CLI tools towards an App Store model too.

The day that happens is the day Apple sees a mass exodus of developers to Linux, I don't think they'd be that stupid. They enjoy enough goodwill right now as the platform of choice (vs. Windows for those that don't want to run desktop Linux), I can't imagine they'd casually just throw that away.

> I don't think they'd be that stupid.

We're talking about the company that abandoned CUDA, OpenCL and Vulkan mere moments before they were killer technologies. If Apple wanted to phase-out Homebrew, I genuinely think most of the community would nod in unison and switch to developing in UTM. Mac owners are nothing if not flexible.

Yeah no, as a Mac and Linux user, I would seize buying Mac hardware and buy exclusively Linux if they took down Homebrew from being usable. At that point a Mac is no longer a Unix system.

The Mac is barely a UNIX system to begin with. It doesn't ship with UNIX compliance out-of-the-box, and nobody complains. You're likely the minority here.

If Apple locked Homebrew behind SIP or some other inconvenience, it would just result in more virtualization. The default Mac environment hasn't followed industry standards for more than a decade, most professionals are doing their work in a VM already. Truth be told, even Apple wants you to stop compiling software locally in the long-run: https://developer.apple.com/xcode-cloud/

If Claude Code was in the Mac App Store, they would have signed an agreement to do so (offer an in-app purchase option and Apple gets a 30% cut of subscriptions for the first year, 15% after that).

They would also be sandboxed such that the app wouldn't have access to the level of system integration it needs.

Hilarious how this is more than my tax rate. My tax rate gets education, healthcare, policing, etc etc.

On the other side Apple gets money, so they can make *whole* world better, not just your country.

Think about how many lives were improved just by M* CPUs or Siri

> Think about how many lives were improved just by M* CPUs or Siri

But these were paid for by the hardware purchase.

Oh but you do get policing...

Look at how many different APIs you get as a developer on iOS.

Feels more like a sales tax (VAT) though, which is the same for everyone.

Exactly, not even a progressive tax!

dont give Apple any ideas!

You joke, but legally they could. If game engines can charge a licence fee as a % of revenue from games developed on those engines, then legally there's not much to stop apple doing the same. Of course consumers and enterprises wouldn't tolerate it, but the barrier is commercial rather than legal.

Guess it is no different than Docker Desktop charging based on your revenue. The idea being charging based on some second order.

I've long believes that the requirement to use in-app purchasing was to make such revenue sharing easier to audit - if you can only use Apple's payment system to do certain things (or else your app isn't approved), then Apple doesn't have to worry about things like audits.

Since various countries have regulated the ability to do third party payments from apps, Apple has since added API to launch said payments, to help generate statistics on use so that they can then demand third party auditing that the commissions are still being properly paid.

In the US there was a court decision that they couldn't meter or charge commission, which may very well be walked back and will lead to lots of fun future articles.

It made sense in the early days, phone operators were charging up to 90% for the infrastucture to send an SMS, and get a download link to a J2ME/Windows CE/Pocket PC/Symbian/Palm/Blackberry download link to install the app.

So everyone raced to the iOS app store, it was only 30%, what a great deal!

The problem is that two decades later it is no longer that great deal in mobile duopoly world.

It's kind of interesting that while the structure is largely the same, the underlying behaviour/intent has morphed from a disruptor-model into being toxic rent-seeking behaviour.

Isn't it strictly worse that they're already thinking they're entitled to 30% of your salary because your clients use Apple hardware? You can change what you use, you can't change what they use.

That's of course on top of the 30% they take on things you buy using your salary via Apple devices.

and the 30% they take from the things you sell via apple devices, once your work is done.

All the regulators in the world have their sights set on them and they know it. The light is half on already and the music is slowing. This party is soon to be over. It's a last ditch attempt at milking all they can.

Stuff like this is ironic but I do think it's escape hatches like this that will make these tech companies, if they ever go down, go down kicking and screaming. Any platform holder that ever finds themselves in a bad place financially will 100% pull all the levers like this.

Honestly that joke is uncomfortably close to how the logic already works...

30% of my yearly unrealised gains would be fair.

Don't worry, they're ethical because interns will only pay 15%.

They already do if you're always buying a new apple product

They certainly would if they could.

Don't give them any ideas haha

Come on, if you work on a MacBook then Tim Apple deserves at least one of your kidneys. It's only fair.

30% of profit from stock sales initiated on Apple hardware should automatically go to Apple. Because why not. It's a digital sale, there is no physical goods changing hands. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. /s

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