LET’S GET MONEY FROM CHILDREN –

Oct. 31, 2022 – This is one reason why I’ve been a bit more comfortable inviting Apple’s products into my home, compared to Google’s, or Amazon’s, or Facebook’s Meta’s, or (to a lesser extent) Microsoft’s. It’s about where each of those companies makes its money. If the products have no up-front cost, and most of the company’s revenue is coming from ads or other kinds of targeting-derived, tracking-derived products, as the saying goes, “you are the product.”

It might be pollyanna-ish of me to base purchasing decisions on this gut feeling, but as long as Apple was making most of its money from hardware sales, I could at least tell myself that the internal and external pressures on the company would incentivize a continued focus on good hardware running good software, rather than chasing click-through rates and user engagement. As Apple began to play up its focus on privacyto draw a stronger contrast between itself and Google, it seemed even more likely that Apple would resist the urge to tuck ads and pushy notifications into all of its apps.

But things have shifted, and continue to shift, on Apple’s financial reports. Compare Apple’s non-hardware revenue a decade ago to what it is now: in 2012, software, services, and sales of music and other media amounted to about $12 billion of the $156.5 billion Apple earned that year, or 7.7 percent. In 2022, that has climbed to $78.1 billion out of $394.3 billion, or nearly 20 percent.

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