Apple made $125 million from their ad network iAd in 2012.

Apple made $41.66 billion from all products in FY2012. The amount from iAd appears to be negligible.

The parent said: "Apple makes money from you buying their products, not from selling ads." This is factually incorrect. Apple does make money from selling ads. Likely somewhere between $250m and $500m a year now as mobile ad revenue has increased quite a bit the last couple years.

While this would represent just a fraction of Apple's overall profits, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

I like how you have been incessantly downvoted despite being completely accurate.

The Apple fan club on HN is strong and tolerates no dissent.

Sure, he is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, if you get off on pedantry.

This is also technically correct: let’s assume Apple made $500M in iAd revenue in 2013 (his upper bound); they made about $150B in revenue in the same year, which makes iAd 0.3% of the revenue. That is clearly what’s driving the business.

The comment

> Apple makes money from you buying their products, not from selling ads. They therefore want to respect your privacy, compared to, say, Google.

was poorly worded. More precisely, TazeTSchnitzel used “makes money from” instead of “exists thanks to” or some more appropriate phrase. The response

> Apple made $125 million from their ad network iAd in 2012.

replies to that wording error, ignoring the bigger argument. This could've been an honest mistake—the parent did use figure of speech instead of precise term, after all—or an intentional use of fallacy.

Then the thread spirals into discussing whether TazeTSchnitzel or JohnTHaller is correct (both are and both aren't), and now ends up with HN meta-discussion.

> Sure, he is technically correct, which is the best kind of correct, if you get off on pedantry.

He isn't technically correct. The GP provided a factually correct statement.

> That is clearly what’s driving the business.

By no interpretation is that statement even technically correct.

It's a pretty common thing to happen on HN. You get it with Google Chrome, too, anytime you point out the fact that every character you type of every URL is sent to Google which doesn't happen in browsers like Firefox (it's the whole reason the search box is purposely kept separate, so only what you enter in the search box is sent to the search provider for auto-complete).

I think it's more likely that people disagree with your literal reading of the original statement. The money that Apple makes from iAds doesn't matter – there's certainly no indication that it drives policy, which was the subject under discussion. Responding that it's not exactly zero doesn't add much to the discussion.

I tend to think that a (likely now) quarter of a billion dollars or more a year does matter. It matters less than iPhone/iPad revenue, of course... proportional to the money if not less-so (as in mattering less per dollar than iOS). But saying a quarter of a billion dollars a year in revenue doesn't matter and doesn't drive certain decision-making within any company is a bit naive.