Apple is the most profitable company in the world and consistently takes almost all of the profit in the smartphone industry. They also make a large portion of the profits in the PC world despite their relatively meager market share. Does Apple really want to expand into the sub $200, or even $100, smartphone market? Unless they do, I don't even really see Google/Android as their competitor.
I know it can be short sighted to base things on personal anecdotes, but while I don't use an iPhone myself, almost all of my friends do and they extensively use Google products ranging from Gmail, Maps, Photos and search.
Apple seems to have the best of both worlds in the current situation. They dominate the high end profitable hardware market and their users still get to benefit from Google products if they so choose. I'm not convinced that Apple would be better off if Google disappeared. Replicating all those services will be expensive.
1) It would create a bad product, according to Google's own prior statements on the matter.
2) It would encourage government authorities to look even closer at potential abuses toward consumers (ie what kind of consumer harm is occurring, if any, when a monopoly search provider prevents attempts by consumers to use ad blockers; that would have to be resolved legally). European authorities would likely pounce on such a move immediately, looking for any opening by mistake to go after the company, given how they've handled Google thus far.
I don't see apple killing the revenue stream that feeds their bottomless pool of capacity.
Have been wondering for a while they are building an internal cloud e.g. using FoundationDB acquisition as their DBaaS.
Infighting Slows Apple’s Cloud Engineering Efforts: http://go.theinformation.com/2c8e01
> Two engineering teams working on new internal cloud-computing infrastructure to power Apple’s Web services are in open conflict, the people say. Already, the infighting has sparked at least one key employee departure, with more expected soon.
Inside Apple’s Cloud Infrastructure Troubles: http://go.theinformation.com/d716c4
> Despite years of trying, Apple has failed to develop infrastructure to handle traffic for its Internet services, which include iTunes, Apple Maps, iMessage and backups of images and videos stored on the iPhone.
If I were Tim Cook, I'd be at least a little tempted to update iOS and OSX to include adblocking on by default.