Well..

> Apple’s most recent earnings report revealed that it earned $12.51B from Services in calendar Q3/fiscal Q4, though there is no breakdown on how much of this comes from ad revenue.

Notice the 'could's:

> Samik Chatterjee argued the company could leverage the millions of users who search its App Store and Safari browser daily to generate the stellar growth seen by Facebook and Google in recent years.

> he launch of Apple TV+, coupled with Apple Inc’s foray into digital services, could help the company increase its income from advertising by more than five fold to $11 billion annually

This article is literally just speculation. Actually, it's quoting someone's speculation.

> The report seems highly speculative…

There’s a lot of guesswork there. It’s even worse than that actually, they assume that their advertising operation will grow as Facebook’s. It is extremely implausible under current conditions (no tracking and ads limited to the stores). So yeah, if Apple were Facebook, ads would be important to them.

And even the wildest estimates put it far short on the actual money maker, which is hardware sales. When push comes to shove, if they have to choose between ad and devices, they won’t hesitate long.

I saw a few articles when I searched from the previous year which also projected growth to the $2b number the next year but as Apple bundles it all in services who knows?

At 2 billion it’s < 1% their revenue (265b)

Yes I'm hoping that should be enough to dampen their ambitions