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Comment by npalli | Hacker News Reader

70% of the revenue and (maybe) 80% of the profit of Apple comes from a single product - the iPhone. Apple themselves have given lower guidance going forward. There is a limit to the number of people buying iPhone at huge margins every year. The total units might continue to grow but not at the current margins and not as frequently. Hard to be bullish unless some other product takes off.

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unlike Google, where practically 100% comes from one single product, which is ads.

all "other bets" are actually losing money, per their data.

People love Apple's products (for the most part). People hate ads (pretty much everyone). So this makes no sense to me at all that Google is worth more than Apple. If you imagine the future, no one really knows what each will do with all the stuff they are building, so saying Google is worth more than Apple in the future seems silly.

> People hate ads (pretty much everyone).

And yet the percentage of people who watch the Super Bowl explicitly to see the ads is a non-trivial percentage of the viewing population (obviously anecdata, but I know many people who throw super bowl parties for groups who have no interest in the football, and just want to have a party while watching the moderately amusing, big-budget ads with breaks for football in between).

I don't think people hate ads on principle. Some do, and they're vocal, but most people hate ads because they're annoying and obnoxious. If every ad was as well produced and as tailored to the content as super bowl ads are, people would be fine with advertising. Instead we get the ugliest, most obtrusively designed 10 second animations looping alongside articles and in between paragraphs, advertising disguised as content, and tracking scripts that reveal to questionable organizations an unsavory level of detail into our lives.

> People hate ads (pretty much everyone)

Except of course, the people actually paying for ads don't hate them... otherwise they wouldn't be paying for them.

Nope: there's Google ads, Google non-ads, and "Other Bets". Q4 Google non-ad revenue was $2.1 billion, or almost 10%, and this share has been steadily increasing.

https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2015/Q4_google_earnin...

yes, but no numbers on profits out of those segments.

OP was pointing out investor's criticism of Apple as a one-trick pony due to iPhone - I am pointing out that outside of ads, nothing generates any significant profit at Google either, even more so actually.

but whatever, HN really is the wrong forum for certain topics.

Don't know why you're getting downvoted but I agree. Google is just as much, if not more so, of a one-trick pony as Apple.

Yeah and Apple's Services business is also growing like crazy. Doesn't matter, the market apparently considers Apple to have zero stickiness.

The "other bets" that are (in aggregate) losing money are things that Alphabet does that are not part of Google. While Google is nearly 100% advertising revenue, it has non-advertising revenue streams inside of Google.

And we only know that the "other bets" (non-Google Alphabet operations) are losing money in aggregate, not that all of them are losing money individually.

We do know more: Ruth Porat basically said that Nest, Fiber, and Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences, and where I work) are making money.

Moreover, that the vast majority of capex spend over the next year will be Fiber roll-out, which is pretty reasonably considered as a one time impairment in my opinion, and not remotely like data center build-outs, real estate purchases, etc.

I'd compare Google's ads to consumer electronics as a category as opposed to the iPhone: they're many eggs, not just one. Search ads, DoubleClick, and AdSense are like the iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, on open-source software that doesn't have anything to do with ads.)

It's worth noting that 30% of Apple is close to a $70B company, which would probably have $10B in profit. Granted the iPhone helps make all of that other business possible, but even non-iPhone Apple is pretty huge.

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