alt Hacker NewsI'm confused at what you're trying to say here. Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
Apple's services revenue is larger than Macs and iPads combined, with a 75% profit margin, compared to under 40% for products (hardware).
Yeah, they serve as a middleman...an incredibly dominant middleman in a duopoly. 80% of teenagers in the US say they have an iPhone. Guess what, all that 15-30% app store revenue is going to Apple. That's pretty much the definition of a service juggernaut.
I also don't agree with you about the lack of selling Apple services to non-Apple users. TV+ is a top-tier streaming service with huge subscriber numbers, and their app is on every crappy off-brand smart TV and streaming stick out there. Yes, there really are Android users who subscribe to Apple Music - 100 million+ downloads on the Google Play store, #4 top grossing app in the music category.
>Why exactly doesn't the service revenue matter again? For some pedantic reason of Apple being metaphorically similar to a brick and mortar store?
You seem to operating under the notion that anything that isn't a device sold is a service. I think that definition is too broad to have any real value and that we should look at the actual business model for a product to determine its categorization. I'm not sure what else to say if you're just going to dismiss that as "pedantic".
But either way, it should be obvious that "services" (however they are defined) are a smaller part of Apple's business than they are for Microsoft, Google, Meta, Twitter, Oracle, Open AI, Anthropic, and most other players in both the general tech and AI spaces.