> Safari is the highest margin product Apple has ever made, accounts for 14-16% of Apple’s annual operating profit
Does anyone know what this means? Safari is built in to the OS, how exactly would you measure its margin? Are they just talking about the Google search deal?
They're referring to the "Google Search Deal", where Google shares 36% of ad revenue with Apple in exchange for being default search provider across their devices, an amount approximately $20b/year for basically just not changing the default. Which was revealed in Google's antitrust trial, where the deal has been deemed illegal.
Interesting. So it doesn't have anything to do with the browser engine ban, since Apple presumably doesn't earn money from a Google search from Chrome on iOS regardless of whether it's powered by WebKit or Blink.
It does have a lot to do with the browser engine ban.
It means that if someone else comes up with a much better browser engine than Safari’s, iPhone users cannot use it so Safari remains competitive even though it may have a browser engine that’s lacking, since others are forced to use Safari’s browser engine and not their much better engine.
Safari is the default browser and they don't support ad blocking very well. It's easily the worst web browsing experience of any platform I've used in the last 5 years.
Safari supports ad blocking just fine. In fact I switched from a google pixel to iphone precisely for this feature. On the pixel there was no way to have ad blocking in embedded browsers, and of course so many apps defaulted to embedded browsers for that very reason. On iOS the blocking works everywhere.
Safari as a browser is great on iOS. The problem is the forced default of google search, and worse, you can't even use search engines outside of a very small number of built-in. E.g. I can't set the. default to be kagi. This is because the money from google is dependant on them sending users to the "search" site.
I think it's a bit misleading to call Safari a "high margin product" based on that logic, considering they could have made even more profit by not making it at all and just charge Google the exact same money to let them ship Chrome as the default iOS browser... (I mean an actual Chrome browser, not the Chrome skin of a WebKit browser that Google currently has to settle for.)
I'm not saying I'd prefer that scenario, just that it would have been a feasible choice for Apple and as such their Safari costs are actually profit losing not profit generating (other than potentially indirectly, if Apple is correct that limiting devices to their own browser engine improves the product and therefore aids device sales, but I don't think anyone would argue that's significant enough to call it their biggest profit driver).
If a supermarket has their own store brand products it's fair to say that those products have a profit margin, even if the store could replace their spot on the shelf with a product of someone else.
Sure, but if they get to keep $x per item for both own brand and other brand products, but have zero expenses for other brand products vs. having to pay to create/ship/etc. the own brand versions, you wouldn't talk about what great profit margins the own brand products have.
Plus, in this store nobody is buying any of the items, the only revenue is from the Nestlé sign above the door, which they'd earn even if they threw all of their own brand products into the bin rather than letting customers have them. So it's not an exact analogy...
I'm talking about historic choices rather than current options - but yes I agree that even if they wanted to, they'd face legal trouble if they tried now to replace Safari with an exclusive deal for Chrome to be the only browser.
