Their ability to profit "one way or another" is contingent on their ability to keep third party payments out entirely or make them so expensive nobody can use them - and that tactic doesn't seem likely to survive much longer.

▲ williamdclt 16 hours ago | parent [-]

> Their ability to profit "one way or another" is contingent on their ability to keep third party payments out entirely or make them so expensive nobody can use them

Why? Off the top of my mind (far from an expert and not thinking about it very hard), they can profit from AI in the following ways that have nothing at all to do with the app store:

    - selling the best devices for local AI (which they kind of are with apple silicon and mac minis)
    - selling devices (mostly phones probably) with excellent AI integration that are superior to the competition (remains to be seen, but that's the sort of thing that Apple tends to be better at than the competition)
    - selling AI-powered services (not super convinced, I don't think Apple is excellent at services)

For example if they capture 10% more of the global phone market because iPhones became that much better than alternatives thanks to AI integrations, that'd probably offset decline in app store revenue.

Just throwing random ideas and numbers here, just making the point that shifting environment can weaken a revenue stream while strengthening (or enabling) others

	▲	benoau 16 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sure they can keep selling hardware and try to sell their own services, but none of these are as high-margin or scalable as fees on everyone else's services. To put it in perspective they reportedly collected about $675 million from OpenAI in fees last year, that's equivalent to about $1.5-$2 billion revenue in hardware sales and TBD for AI services but certainly over $1 billion. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/03/20/apple-made-nearly-900m-...
	▲	satvikpendem 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Services revenue is way more lucrative.