51–60 of 63 posts
1. Do you think your employer can calculate the profit margin on what you do? I sincerely doubt it, unless maybe you work in sales or something.
2. How would you calculate the value of HN to YC?
3. How would you calculate the value of iMessage? It has no direct revenue, but it has a huge effect on other revenue. How much though?
Doesn't courts have the power to ask Apple to actually calculate this number and give the supporting evidence about that? Because judges are not robots and understand that it is really Apple doesn't want to know the number so that it doesn't have to disclose the margin. This is probably not the first a time a company trying this tactic in court. It would be surprising (for me) if not.
How could they calculate this if they weren't tracking it? The cost would need to included not just development hours that have gone into creating and maintaining the system, but hours of other employee's used for the project. Also the servers, the network, buildings, etc. If there were forced to calculate this number, it wouldn't surprise me if they were able to do so in a manner that shows they lose money. At best…
That's why a court would ask for the procedures that they followed and revise if they did something like that intentionally. This would be the definition of malicious compliance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Considering how Schiller and other Apple executives straight up regularly lie to the engineering public, there's not a whole lot of mystery here. Yeah, like Schiller isn't ever told about revenue and expenses at Apple. Please. What a joke.
Exactly. If they can't calculate it how do they know they're not losing money? If they know they're not losing money how do they know that?
If they were losing money, what would they do? They probably can't raise their rates, since people are already very unhappy with their current rates, so it would be a hard sell given how much the company as a whole makes. They can't close the App Store, since it would flush their entire iPhone line down the toilet. Could they lower costs? Probably—cut back on reviewers, get rid of the promotional pages they create. I dunno.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you serious? What company doesn’t categorize labor and expenses, especially for capitalization and R&D purposes. There’s zero chance Apple doesn’t know. It’s 100% nonsense. They know all the labor costs and revenue for each of their products. Every single one. Zero chance Apple doesn’t categorize server allocation and assign those to budgets. Small companies do it. So, the obvious answer is they’re lying. They’ve…
The GP claims to be qualified as an accountant and gives a simple example of how this type of problem can have no clear answer. Your rebuttal is simply “of course they know the answer”. Is there any reason someone reading this thread should prefer your take over theirs?
I am no expert, but that seems like a 74% margin on services, which would seem to include their "app store".
It is difficult for me to imagine that apple is somehow incapable of breaking those numbers down into smaller component categories.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The GP claims to be qualified as an accountant and gives a simple example of how this type of problem can have no clear answer. Your rebuttal is simply “of course they know the answer”. Is there any reason someone reading this thread should prefer your take over theirs?
Apple directly reported sales of "services" in the last reported quarter to be 24972M and cost of those sales to be 6485M. https://investor.apple.com/investor-relations/default.aspx I am no expert, but that seems like a 74% margin on services, which would seem to include their "app store". It is difficult for me to imagine that apple is somehow incapable of breaking those numbers down into smaller component categorie…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really believe that Tim Cook doesn’t know the profit margin on a key Apple product?
How much "profit" does the app store need to pay back to all the api development that powers the apps under the hood? Similar to the amazon dont make a profit for a decade by dumping it into growth, Apple can dump all their app store "profit" into developing new api's that apps can access, such as ai tools etc.
For those claiming Apple should be able to calculate the App Store's profit margin - can you actually define how to do it? As someone who qualified as an accountant over 15 years ago, it's not obvious to me how you would develop a meaningful allocation of costs. I suspect this misunderstanding stems from the same thinking that leads people to believe the myth that Costco makes no profit on its physical products, only…
I assumed Apple's margin was 30%, the difference between what a user pays and what the developer receives. Am I missing something here?
I'd say a hard limit like 10% for digital download stores (app store, google play, steam, ...), and 20% for streaming sites (youtube, twitch, ...)