[ephemeral-life]

Revenue doesn't really matter, you should look at profits. Amazon makes most of their revenue from the website, but pretty much all of their profits come from cloud. The tech giant business model is to dominate distribution and extract profits by self preferencing. Im sure apple's services division is a good portion of their profits.

[JimDabell]

> Revenue doesn't really matter

Grandparent is claiming that Apple aren’t a hardware company any more. Pointing out that the vast majority of their income comes from hardware is totally relevant.

Apple brings in hundreds of billions from selling hardware every year. They are definitely still a hardware company.

[the_gipsy]

The income is irrelevant if it's just a vessel to make profits from the services. In detriment of the user, who once could trust that they were buying a device, but now are getting locked in some subscription schemes.

Apple has passed the event horizon of extracting profits now.

[JimDabell]

> The income is irrelevant if it's just a vessel to make profits from the services.

It’s not though. Apple are bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars every year from hardware. That’s not a means to an end, that is the end itself.

[the_gipsy]

You seem to not understand the difference between income and profit.

[JimDabell]

I do, but unless you think Apple’s hundreds of billions in hardware revenue is some kind of loss leader, it’s irrelevant.

Apple are a hardware company. It’s bizarre that you are trying to argue otherwise. They make more money from selling consumer hardware than practically every other company in the world.

[disgruntledphd2]

> Apple are a hardware company. It’s bizarre that you are trying to argue otherwise. They make more money from selling consumer hardware than practically every other company in the world.

You are definitely correct in that Apple are a hardware company.

However (and I think this is the point of disagreement) much of their revenue growth (and presumably profits, but that's harder to assess) comes from services, and from a stock price perspective revenue/profit growth is what matters (you're only as good as your last quarter and all that).

Understanding this is key to understanding lots of Apple's business decisions recently (my favourite was destroying the business model of their competitors using ATT and then refusing to declare their own ad business ATT compliant).

[the_gipsy]

What makes you say that it's irrelevant unless it's a loss leader?

When BMW is gatekeeping features behind subscriptions, is that also irrelevant because they're a car company? We shouldn't just stop discussing it.

[fillipvt]

aren't profit margins the main drivers for the decisions leading to this post to begin with? if revenue was all they cared about, I don't think what's happening would come to fruition

[mdhb]

He seems to have a habit of doing this.

A few weeks ago I was also stuck in a situation where he appeared to play dumb and refused to acknowledge the contradictions in his positions and the level of indignation that followed afterwards was unbelievable.

[JimDabell]

No, you were repeatedly insulting me and when I rejected that, you told me I was getting worked up and continued insulting me. You were saying that it literally wasn’t possible to honestly disagree with you:

> this also isn’t a legitimate difference of opinion scenario.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39026820

You were being unreasonable and insulting. If you are going to continue to act like that, how about we stay out of each other’s way? Don’t drag this thread down into a flamewar as well.