> 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.
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.
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.