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Comment by Jyaif | Hacker News Reader

> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made.

Anybody has the number of committers to webkit from Apple? It would give us a good idea on the margin of the product.

Assuming 100 engineers costing Apple 500k per year, that's 50 millions in investment for 20 billion in revenue.

> For each 1% browser market share that Apple loses for Safari, Apple is set to lose $200 million in revenue per year.

They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?

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FWIW, there is a very high probability that Google's $20B yearly payment to Apple is going to vanish, pending a current trial.

Safari is actually a pretty great browser, both technically and from a user perspective, and the complaints often levied on sites like this usually boil down to "Why do alternatives to Chrome exist? So annoying! I'm incredibly lazy and want to just deploy whatever half-baked non-standard ad-benefiting nonsense Google threw into Chrome this month". There was a Safari for Windows for some time but they had a small enough uptake that they abandoned it.

> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there instead of just relying on their monopole. And why the fuck is there no Windows version to make their iOS users happy?

Simple. Apple doesn't want you to use Windows. They want you to buy an expensive Apple computer instead.

Why would you only count engineers?

Same reason I choose 500k, it's an approximation.

Given that Stack overflow has 500 employees, I'd say Safari requires 500 people rather than 100.

FWIW 119 unique @apple addresses appear in Webkit.git in the last year.

( `git log --since="1 year ago" --pretty="%cn <%ce>" | grep "apple" | sort -u | wc -l` )

Of course there's more to Safari than just Webkit, and there's more than just committers. So yes, the number may be close to 500 in total.

Assuming a generous 500k cost per employee, we reach 250 million USD, which is less than 2% of what they get for Safari.

Safari is essentially pure profit.

> They should be investing like crazy to make Safari the best browser out there

So true. It didn’t occur to me that I had naturally assumed Safari to be worse, when it would have been better in a more competitive market. So by relying on monopolistic behavior, Apple is also partly responsible for the Chromium monopoly (that this law will help solidify).

They don't want their iOS users to be happy using Windows.

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