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It's not a free service. One of them had a 2TB+ iCloud account. That has a monthly cost. Not free. The free plan only gives you 5GB storage. Apple is not an advertising company. We pay for the phone and we pay for iCloud.

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ddtaylor a day ago | parent | next [-]

You pay to rent the phone I'm pretty sure.

	▲	voidspark a day ago \| parent [-]
		I don't know what you are talking about. You can buy an iPhone. They sell 200 million iPhones every year. Just go to the shop and buy one.

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eesmith 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Apple is too an advertising company.

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.

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voidspark 16 hours ago | parent [-]

Should be obvious that I meant their main business and revenue stream is not ads, unlike Google. We all know that Apple sells some ads

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eesmith 16 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

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voidspark 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Just using common sense.

$4B is less than 1% of their 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.

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eesmith 5 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you are using gross sales?

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%.

	▲	voidspark 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Apple’s 2024 revenue was $391 Billion. Advertising is therefore about 1% of their revenue. Simple mathematics. "Total net sales" is $391 Billion. $295 Billion from products plus $96 Billion from services. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2024-q4/FY24_Q4_Consol... Don't confuse quarterly with annual revenue. Quarterly is just for three months. Four quarters within a year. Apple's fiscal (financial) year ends in September.