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Google Earns $2 Per Handset; Apple, $575
Hugh Pickens writes "While Apple generates more than $575 in profit for every iOS device, and according to estimates in 2007 Apple earned more than $800 on every iPhone sold through ATT, Horace Dediu reports that Android generated less than $550m in revenues for Google between 2008 and the end of 2011, earning only $1.70 per year, per Android device — explaining how Apple is sucking up two thirds of the profit in the mobile phone business. Dediu's starting point is a settlement offer Google made to Oracle of $2.8 million and 0.515% of Android revenues on an ongoing basis. His assumption is that those numbers represent Google's revenue from Android to date. 'If this is the case,' writes Dediu, 'We have a significant breakthrough in understanding the economics of Android and the overall mobile platform strategy of Google.' Of course profitability is not the only reason Google is in the mobile phone business. 'P&L considerations were not the only (or even at all) factors in investment for Google. Having a hedge against hegemony of potential rivals, having a means to learn and develop new business and having a role in defining the post-PC computing paradigm are all probably bigger considerations than profitability,' writes Dediu. 'My take is that [Android] is not a bad business. But it's also not a great one.'"
It should be no surprise to anybody at this point that Apple has found the most efficient way to screw their customers out of the most money possible for the same thing you get from everyone else.
As far as I'm concerned, Apple not being evil ended with the introduction of the Intel Mac. They went all dictator-over-everything after that, from hardware to support plans to software to development process. Completely awful bullshit methods, just to keep it all under their thumb and guarantee all possible profits flow into their wallet and not the devs or consumers.
Is it really worth paying almost twice as much for everything for that?
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits