Hacker News Reader

Comment by Y_Y | Hacker News Reader

Dependent? From over here it just seems like they're Walter White with such a huge pile of cash that life itself becomes meaningless.

View on HN

For-profit companies (especially large ones) are machines whose primary function is to make profits. Anything else they do along the way (employ people, make products, provide services, trash the environment, etc) is a side effect.

He's still got a point. there is no scenario where apple needs the money they get from app store, so there has to be another explanation. I mean, no one will convince me that a company with 366 billion in revenue is dependent on 12 billion in revenue from app store.

There is something we're not being told here. Because the reasons all these commenters are throwing out make zero sense.

> there is no scenario where apple needs

You're assuming the existence of a 'need'. Part of my point is that there doesn't have to be any 'need' for additional revenue beyond the revenue itself.

It also seems like you may be assuming that the person or people responsible for this and other similar decisions are incentivized to consider all of Apple's revenue as opposed to a specific subset of it, which I suspect is unlikely.

Companies exist to enrich shareholders and they all agree on one point: they want more.

Especially newer shareholders who just started their wealth building journey - they want more innovation and more products so the share price and dividends can increase as the company scales more.

Somebody should tell shareholders about the goose.

You and I both probably own some AAPL through an ETF. We should tell ourselves about the goose.

I think App Store revenue is pretty close to hardware revenue at this point, which is absolutely mind-boggling once you consider the volume/margins of the iPhone. 80-odd billion dollars of Developer Program subscriptions and 30% cuts, what a racket.

> App Store revenue is pretty close to hardware revenue at this point,

Fiscal 2022 Services revenue is 77 million and iPhone revenue is 220 million, so it's not there yet, but it's beating iPad (29 million) and Mac (40 million) combined which is nothing to sneeze at.

I don't think that Apple discloses App Store revenue separate from Services revenue

https://sixcolors.com/post/2022/11/apples-fiscal-2022-in-cha...

Hmm, I thought it's traditional media feature to confuse millions with billions, didn't expect that on HN.

Apple says they paid out 60B in App Store revenue to developers in 2021, if you used the 30% figure (which is unfair because they charge 15% on +1yr subscriptions and <1M revenue) that would be like 26B in commissions. Take that for what you will.

Would you like a [visual representation](https://www.statista.com/statistics/382260/segments-share-re...) of how incorrect you are? App Store revenue is part of "Services", which accounts for just shy of 1/5 of the company's revenue. The rest is by definition hardware. Certainly services as a growth division has been a big part of Apple's story to investors, but to say that App Store revenues is close to hardware revenue is clearly daft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com