They had no understanding of the phone industry, the music industry, photography, etc, etc but that didn't stop them learning about them and eventually dominating.

I don't think it's a technology issue, it's a business one. They have built a position on customer privacy and moving into the search/ad business is inconsistent with that. Take Google's money and let the Goog take the flak on privacy.

They also had no understanding of maps, email, cloud storage, or mouse ergonomics and they still don't.

That’s fair, fortunately those don’t matter as much.

It's not about money. Google also has all the money in the world, and yet their customer devices suck. Apple has all the money in the world, and yet their online services suck.

Those are very different worlds, that require organizations built in very different way.

Apple has so much money that they can be whatever they want to be. Didn't they say they have around $200B of cash on hand earlier this year?

[1] says $204B around April time, yep.

[1] https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-every...

Apple could buy duckduckgo to go along/try to regain their privacy branding. Yea, duckduckgo has a lot of work to do to get to google level(afaik they're just a bing skin atm), but it'd be a decent start.

I doubt they would want to buy a search engine that heavily relies on Bing.

Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs. It is a matter of brute work basically, an army of programmers. CPU design is a lot more sophisticated.

> Building a search engine is mundane compared to developing CPUs

Not for Apple - they have hardware excellence in their DNA, but the web and internet services aren't a core competency (yet?). They have made huge strides from the disaster that was MobileMe, but they are nowhere close to where the Bing or Google search teams are.

> hardware excellence in their DNA

Yes, thats why my $4000 macbook pro keyboard inserts double keys strokes on 50% of key presses. The excellence must all be in the magic touchbar that periodically stops working so I cant even use vim because the ESC key is on a broken touch screen.

...and that's their wheelhouse. Now imagine how much of a shitshow MobileMe really was.

Not really. The vast majority of CPU design is just logic in Verilog/VHDL, similar to software.

Google search sucks nowadays anyway comapared to 20 years ago.

right. it does. besides, Google paid since initial release of Safari when Cupertino had decided what the final design/functions of Safari were going to be -- seems many forgot about that as well as where and when Goo blunt and boldly went headhunting for new staff and peeps in p2p underground in the days Carracho was about to become -- very briefly -- a much fancied p2p-client

I agree, but they could always acquire some search startup.

... and then build/buy/lease the appropriate amount of cloud compute to be able to host it.

I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain them in terms customer experience?

Furthermore, as inquiries of monopoly power poke at Apple, there is likely little appetite (if there ever was) to expand their monopoly horizontally into other industries.

> I mean, sure they could, but what would that expense gain?

Giant piles of money

> in terms customer experience?

This being the top concern doesn't really mesh with the game theory of google giving them $15B. If everyone believed UX was apple's primary concern, and that google was the best option, then google would not have to pay.

Unless it makes more than 15B for Apple in terms of being able to do something with their own search (advertising?), it is a loss.

Google is paying for Apple to not have the default be Google search. If Google wasn't paying, Apple would be able to offer the default search provider to someone else or make it a user selectable choice in the new phone setup.

Google is paying to keep Apple from thinking about their own provider or shifting the default to Bing.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/297137/mobile-share-of-u...

Organic search from a mobile device is 60% of all Google searches. If we take the 50/50 breakdown for iOS vs Android and apply it there, 1/3rd of all google searches are from iOS.

That's what Google is paying for - making sure that people who don't care about their search provider continue to make up 1/3 of all of their searches (and data gathering).

The next thing to consider back on that "what would the expense gain" ... does Apple have the resources to spin up a 1/3 google data center. I mean, yea they do... but that's expensive and if they aren't selling adds, it is purely an expense.

I tend to expect Apple would easily make 15B on searches just doing keyword relevance without any tracking

That would be very cuil.