You're describing what economists call multihoming. The antitrust question gp asks - which I think is relevant - is whether the combined entity would have excessive market power in the relevant labor market.

Actually, they sell lots of ads in the app store. I will not be surprised if they sell video ads, display ads or search ads in the future. They could earn tens of billions in revenue per year; the main business question is how that trades off against the various downsides of advertising sales.

Apple generated $416 billion in total net sales in 2025. Of that total, $307 billion (about 74% of total revenue) came directly from their hardware ecosystem. The services segment generated the remaining $109 billion (26%); including their advertising platforms, AppleCare, cloud services, and Apple TV...

Seems like their advertising might not be a focus...

When you’re that big, it’s all a focus. Keeping the growth going is job 1 and you need all cylinders firing to do it.

services are growing 10%+ per year

"Services" includes everything from iCloud storage to AppleCare to Apple Card to Apple Music & Apple TV subscriptions.

Services growth is only tracking slightly ahead of installed base growth. One theory of Services was that it would grow high-margin business organically alongside the growth of the installed base. More iPhone users => more iCloud subscriptions. Notably, this growth rate is roughly predictable even without ads being a factor.

The News app is also spammed full of shitty-looking ads.

> most of the general public do prefer cookbooks with pictures

As a highly literate person, it is easy to overestimate the share of the population that is highly literate.

What’s interesting is how those that over index themselves often miss the obvious which could simply be some things (cook books) are quite helpful with picture. If I am flipping through the cookbook, how would I know what Boeuf Bourguignon is and what good looks like.

Literate people lost their edge

Have you ever heard of affiliate fraud?

Your comment claims that academics do not correct other academics.

Your comment appears on a post in which, literally, academics are correcting other academics.

Data Colada is a handful of volunteers who do this kind of thing as extra-curricular activities, and rely primarily on tips. That is a tiny drop in an ocean of fraud, for which the institutions get no credit at all. Academic institutions don't systematically check for fraud, but they do systematically ignore fraud reports that come from outside the academy (of which there are many).

What about $10000 human with many $200 agents?

You seem to be confusing intelligence with objective function.

Subservience seems to be sublimation of objectives to a master; intelligence seems to point out the ability to realize suboptimality of the master's objective function according to the master's actual objectives.

While an intelligent general may be absolutely loyal, he also would presumably help the king/president to avoid unproductive strategies.

Prompting is a skill.

I understand why this external view exists, as dissemination is inherently part of the scientific mission; but if you look more carefully, you will see that it is simultaneously science promotion, and many of the best participants do not shamelessly promote themselves.

I did a PhD, so not external. Sure one doesn't have to be maximally cynical but a lot of it is self promotion.

And in context: the same can be said about Kaggle, about Youtubers, about music creators etc. Every endeavor is a mix of "pure" promotion of the art and of shameless self promotion and status games. The common factor is humans. My point was, academia is not more pure than the Kaggle guys who fish for industry jobs.