> There’s a side to Apple most iPhone owners don’t know. There's Apple the hardware company, the one that has spent the past several weeks showing off new phones, a more rugged Apple Watch and some confusing new iPads. Then there’s the other, quieter Apple, focused on something of a dirty word: advertising. And that part of Apple is getting bigger by the day.
> Apr 14, 2025 - Apple rebrands its advertising business as 'Apple Ads'
> As Apple expands its advertising business, the company has renamed its former "Apple Search Ads" to "Apple Ads," reflecting the expansion of ad placement.
> Previously, when a business bought ads on the App Store, they would be suggested at the top of the search screen. In 2022, Apple began expanding its advertising practices adding slots in the Today tab and in the "You Might Also Like" slot below individual app listings.
It was not obvious. You can both pay for a service and be the product, while I read your comment as dismissing the second possibility.
FWIW, from the 2022 Wired article:
> Insider Intelligence, a market research firm, estimates that Apple brings in $4 billion a year from ads. ... Investment bank Evercore ISI estimates Apple will have a $30 billion ad business by 2026. That’s about the size of iPad sales in 2021, or a bit under half the company’s services revenue.
The growth in ad revenue is large enough that Apple's latest 10-Q highlights it: "Services net sales increased during the first quarter of 2025 compared to the same quarter in 2024 due primarily to higher net sales from advertising, the App Store and cloud services."
At what point will you consider Apple to be an advertising company? Not until ads are 50% of revenue?
If they can grow their ad business from $4B to $250B (50% of revenue) then yes maybe I’ll call them an ad company, but I am talking about their reality today, and the reality of Apple for the past 50 years, not fantasy or fiction.
We can see from Apple's 2024Q4 10-Q that "Revenue" is described as "Net sales", and that Q4 had $8 billion for the IPad, so about $32 billion for the year - comparable to the prediction of "$30 billion ad business by 2026".
Total net sales in Q4 was $124 billion of which $26 billion was services (where ads and Google income are placed).
The $4 billion was from a few years ago. The actual number doesn't seem to be published, but the numbers seem more like 7-8 billion, which is about 5% of revenue, not less than 1%.
It's an insignificant part of their business even if it doubled or tripled in size.
Apple is obviously not "an advertising company" as opposed to Google which has been an advertising company since the beginning.
Apple was founded as a computer company ~50 years ago which sold the Apple I. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Nothing to do with ads. Now 50 years later they are starting to make some extra money on the side from ad revenue.
You are being weirdly pedantic and arguing to the point of absurdity. At some point you just have to accept basic logic and common sense.
Apple has never been an "ad company". They sell computers, software, subscriptions, and they take a cut of the App Store revenue. Ads are a tiny part of their revenue now. Doesn't make them an "ad company" like Google, where ads are their primary revenue source.
I bought a lot of Apple products. They made their money from the high margin in the purchase price, not ad views which I have never seen anywhere on my Macs and maybe seen a couple of the ads on the app store on my phone. They earned about 1 cent on those two ad views, and thousands of dollars from the hardware sales and iCloud subscription.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-is-an-ad-company-now/
> Oct 20, 2022 - Apple Is an Ad Company Now
> There’s a side to Apple most iPhone owners don’t know. There's Apple the hardware company, the one that has spent the past several weeks showing off new phones, a more rugged Apple Watch and some confusing new iPads. Then there’s the other, quieter Apple, focused on something of a dirty word: advertising. And that part of Apple is getting bigger by the day.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/04/14/apple-rebrands-it...
> Apr 14, 2025 - Apple rebrands its advertising business as 'Apple Ads'
> As Apple expands its advertising business, the company has renamed its former "Apple Search Ads" to "Apple Ads," reflecting the expansion of ad placement.
> Previously, when a business bought ads on the App Store, they would be suggested at the top of the search screen. In 2022, Apple began expanding its advertising practices adding slots in the Today tab and in the "You Might Also Like" slot below individual app listings.