[hapticmonkey]

Apple aren’t in the business of building chatbots to impress investors (other than some WWDC2024 vaporware they’d rather not talk about any more). They’re in the business of consumer hardware.

Consumers want iPhones and (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade. That’s their focus. There’s a huge amount of machine learning and inference that’s required to get those to work. But it’s under the hood and computed locally. Hence their chips. I don’t see what Apple have to gain by building a competitor to what OpenAI has to offer.

[discordance]

~25% of Apple's revenue came from services in FY25 (and 50% from iPhone, ~25% from other hardware). They made $415B in that year, so ~$100B from services alone!

[planb]

Services revenue is mostly just 30% from App Store Sales. This means every time a user clicks a pro account for ChatGPT or Claude on their phone, Apple makes more money than they could make with a self deployed model.

[benoau]

You're not wrong that they collect a ton of rent off AI apps, rumours a few weeks back claimed $900m in fees last year with 75% of that just from OpenAI.

But services revenue is:

- their 36% share of Google Ads for being default search engine, about $21 billion/year of pure profit

- their IAP fees, court testimony reveals 75% profit margin

- their first-party subscriptions, there's an antitrust about iCloud that alleges 52% of iPhone users are on paid plans and that the profit margins are 80-ish percent!

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/19/report-apple-made-roughly-900...

[mdorazio]

Not true. App Store is less than 1/3 of services revenue.

[planb]

Source? But it‘s true that I forgot about the Google Search deal.

[goalieca]

> (if Apple are right) some form of AR glasses in the next decade.

Pretty sure this is just a hedge or simple research project and not a main bet.

[smt88]

Consumers don't necessarily want iPhone. They don't want to be excluded from iMessage, which is a completely different motivation.

[tokioyoyo]

Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user. Basically everyone around me is the same.

[presbyterian]

Agreed, I’ve been a loyal iPhone user for a long time, and very few people I know use iMessage. I use it with my parents because they don’t have any other messenger, and they don’t even really know it’s iMessage, they just think of it as texting. Everyone I know is using something else for messages, whether it’s Discord, Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, or occasionally Telegram or Snapchat.

[smt88]

> Yeah, that just doesn't pass the simplest sniff tests. I barely use iMessage, and yet I'm an iPhone user.

A single anecdote isn't data. You're not a typical consumer.

The only major market where iPhone outsells Android (number of handsets) is the US, and it's because of iMessage. Android is 70% of the world market and dominates LatAm, Africa, and Asia.

[avianlyric]

Why are you comparing a single phone manufacturers market position to the market position of an entire OS?

iOS vs Android isn’t relevant when discussing hardware. It’s Apple vs Samsung etc. iOS doesn’t need majority market ownership for Apple to completely dominate their hardware competitors in a market.

[carlosjobim]

But now you've argued that people are buying Android instead of iPhone just because of social pressure from their peers.

[array_key_first]

In the US it's mostly iMessage, and that includes people who say it's not mostly iMessage.

iPhones are more expensive, on average, for a similar or worse experience. The thing that drives iphone sales is social. People want iPhones because their friends do, and that's a very good reason.

[bdavbdav]

US centric view, which I believe to be wrong. UK is predominantly WhatsApp, and the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones.

Income is a much tighter correlation than messaging platform. Rack up those market shares by phone value and the scales tip even harder.

[hiq]

> the bulk of handsets sold are still iPhones

According to https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-kin... it's closer to 50/50.

[drooopy]

That must be an american thing because I guarantee you that it doesn't mean anything for the rest of the world.

[smt88]

It is, and the iPhone doesn't have overwhelming market share in any other large market, which is my point.

[avianlyric]

But they’re still the largest individual player in just about every market they’re in. So there’s clearly a strong demand for iPhones.

[prmoustache]

That is a very US centric opinion.

In other part of the globe iphone users are mostly using whatsapp or Line and couldn't care less about imessage.

[smt88]

And in those countries, iOS has a much smaller market share. You're proving my point.

[prmoustache]

The sum of all these smaller markets is still bigger than the US one.

[carefree-bob]

When measured in terms of mouths, yes, but when measured in terms of surplus spending power than can go to Apple, certainly not.

India has 1.3 Billion people in terms of counting mouths, but not wallets with $1000 to send to Apple for a new iphone.

[prmoustache]

The biggest region in term of revenues for Apple revenues is all americas but it is still only around 43%, which means Apple still makes money from Africa, Europe, Asia and Ocenia combined than the whole american continent. So that is even less for the USA.

https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-geography

[Maxion]

iMessage is AFAIK only really a big thing in the US.

[smt88]

Yes, and the US is by far Apple's most important handset market. The other iOS-majority countries are small markets for Apple.

[kimos]

Canada too.

I only have WhatsApp installed for when I leave the country.

[barbazoo]

It depends on your social circle obviously. I had a single person I used iMessage with no but we since switched to SMS. Not many people where I live have iphones.

[camkego]

I totally buy this as someone located in the US, but what is everybody else using? It can’t be WhatsApp? Is everyone sending all their connection graphdata to Meta?

[andrewl-hn]

A lot of SMBs use Instagram to connect to their clients, so Instagram build-in messenger is a default option for a lot of people (especially women) in many parts of the world.

Some places have regional messengers that are very entrenched, like Line in Japan or KakaoTalk in Korea.

WhatsApp is a default option in a large number of countries including most of Middle East, parts of Europe, Brazil, most of Africa, Southern Asia. To me it is surprising, too, because out of all messaging options WhatsApp seems like the least developed and least ergonomic.

And yes, this does mean that most people share whatever data Big Tech wants. They use Meta to talk to each other, auto-upload their photos to Google, click "accept" to every cookie banner so that thousands of no-name companies around the world know where they are and what they are doing at all times.

[saberience]

Everyone in the UK and Western Europe uses WhatsApp as their primary messenger.

The only time I ever open iMessage is when I get an SMS 2FA verification code or something similar.

Also, in the Middle East everyone also just uses WhatsApp or Telegram.

[puelocesar]

People who care about privacy (very very few) use signal, everyone else uses Whatsup

[austhrow743]

You understand that Facebook and Instagram are also very popular yes?

[russelldjimmy]

It’s WhatsApp. No one thinks about sending data to Meta. The world is much bigger than the HN bubble, where almost no one thinks about privacy implications.

[lnsru]

Absolutely this. No one cares about privacy. 99,9% population has no clue how tech works. “Oh, it’s an app on my phone.” That’s what typical consumer understands. How text travels from one phone to other is something magical.

Got WhatsApp, because there is no other channel to communicate with customers. It’s literally used by everyone without exceptions. Really scary.

[agos]

in my country it's Whatsapp, and has been since before it was acquired by Meta

[KaiserPro]

I doubt 80% of iphone users would be able to tell you if imessage was on or not.

they might say that some people's messages are green, but not much more.

[russelldjimmy]

No one uses iMessage in my country. Yet iPhones are sought after. Some of us just really like iPhones for the experience - not everything is a conspiracy. People can have different tastes and are more free to choose than people on HN like to believe.

[smt88]

What country?