DuckDuckGo is not it's own search engine. It's an aggregator of other search engines (mostly Bing).

I can't believe can't even do the tiniest bit of research.

DDG isn't an aggregator, and it doesn't use Bing any more than it uses Google, Wikipedia, StackOverflow or anything else.

https://duck.co/forum/thread/4350/did-you-know-that-duckduck...

And yet their own documentation says that their "normal" search results come from Oath (Yahoo) and... Bing:

https://duck.co/help/results/sources

The other sources are only for their "instant answers" that appear at the top.

From what Ive read, DDG uses Bing's API to populate its search results.

https://www.quora.com/How-is-the-Bing-API-used-by-DuckDuckGo

I was just trying to point out that Apple is unlikely to buy a search engine that relies on another competitor's product.

How would Apple make any return? Do you think DDG's ads are as profitable as Google's?

DDG's ads wouldn't need to be as profitable as Google's, they'd only need to be as profitable as what Google pays Apple to use Google as the default search engine, which is likely less than what Google makes on ads on searches from Macs.

Would they need to make a return directly? If they could buy it and put significant resources on it, they'll have a direct competitor against Google, with the advantages of coming by default on Apple devices and of being privacy friendly. Just that might scare Google to pay them more to leave the Search space and put back Google as their default search engine.

In 2014 I thought that Google paid Apple around 1/10 of Google's search ad revenue from iPhones, but that number involved quite a bit of guessing.

They could do what they usually do, and make the service available only to purchasers of Apple hardware.