Talking about billions is disingenuous, you should be talking about percentages of revenue. Ten billion _sounds_ like a lot but really isn't.
For Google, over 80% of their revenue comes from ads.
Apple's revenue is around 380 billion, 5-10 billion in ads is in the "other" category if you draw a pie chart of it... They make 30 billion just selling iPads - their worst selling product.
Apple can lose the ad category completely and they won't even notice it. If Google's ads go away because of privacy protections, the company will die.
Talking absolutes is not accurate either. Not all revenue is equal.
There is reason why NVDIA, TSLA or stocks with growth[1] potential gets the P/E multiple that their peers do not or an blue chip traditional company can only dream of. The core of Apple revenue the biggest % chunk of iPhone sales is stagnant at best falling at worst. Services is their fastest growing revenue segment and already is ~$100 B of the $380B. Ads is a key component of that, 5 years back Ads was less < $1B, that is the important part.
Also margins matter, even at Apple where there is enormous margin for hardware, gross margins for services is going to be higher, that is simple economics of any software service cost of extra user or item is marginal. The $100B is worth lot more than equivalent $100B in iPhone, iPad sales where significant chunk will go to vendors.
Executives are compensated on stock performance, stock valuation depends on expected future growth a lot. Apple's own attempts and the billions invested to get into Auto, Healthcare, or Virtual Reality are a testament to that need to find new streams of revenue.
It would be naive to assume a fast growing business unit does not get outsized influence, any middle manager in a conglomerate would know how true this is.
A Disney theme park executive doing even 5x revenue as say the Disney+ one will not get the same influence, budgets,resources or respect or career paths.
[1] Expected Growth, doesn't have to be real,when it does not materialize then market will correct as is happening to an extent with TSLA.
> Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.
Thats not what I was saying. I was saying that Apple extract more information than google does. I was not saying that Apple process it to make a persona out of you. Thats not the issue here. Apple is saying that they are a "Privacy first" company. To be that, you need to not be extracting data in the first place.
Yes, they make lots of noise about how they do lots of things on device. Thats great and to be encouraged. But Apple are still extracting your friend list, precise location, financial records, various biometrics, browsing and app history. ANd for sure, they need some of that data to provide services.
But whats the data life cycle? are they deleting it on time? who has access to it, what about when a new product wants to use it? how do they stop internal bad actors?
All I want you to do is imagine that Facebook has made iOS, and the iphone, and is now rolling out these features. They are saying the same things as Apple, do you trust them?
Do you believe what they say?
I don't want Apple to fail, I just want people to think critically about a very very large for profit company. Apple is not our friend, and we shouldn't be treating them like they are.
I think what he's getting at is that Apple does collect a lot of very similar data about it's users. Apple Maps still collects data about where you've driven - the difference is that they don't turn around and sell that data like Google loves to do.
Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.
What does Apple have that's even close?