Immaterial would be a wrong word. Negligible might be better. Negligible right now would be perfect. Let's not be naive, they have a full advertisement department trying to monetize their platform and increase the revenue. They also tried to compete with Google for six years for the same, but failed in the in-app advertising. They are still trying to expand their advertising in other areas though:

http://searchengineland.com/apple-expanding-successful-searc...

Apple makes revenue from ad sales - Apple is therefore also an advertising company.

They're the lesser of two evils. Still an evil, though.

> Apple makes revenue from ad sales

Is that even true? They pulled the plug on mobile ad sales a year or two ago (http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/01/18/after-abandoning-i...), where else would they make advertising revenue?

And in any case, a company who makes 99.9% of their revenue off of non-ad sales is definitely would never be categorized as an advertising company. My grocery store is paid to put crest at eye-level, that doesn't make them an advertising company...

The iTunes store shows ads, and they can be demographically and geographically targeted.

I don't know if they're ads or not but there's also location based app suggestions too.

disclaimer: i'm a googler so glass house throwing stones etc, and of course the scale is way different

You're right, I wouldn't say your grocery store is an advertising company because they put Crest at eye level - I'd say they're an advertising company because they likely sell your loyalty card data to 3rd parties for $$$. Adtech is eating everyone's data.

IDFA is still going strong on Apple phones and is likely to continue into iOS 11.