There's really no fundamental reason why iAd couldn't have become a more powerful revenue generating part of their platform. Maybe iAd could have performed sli

There's really no fundamental reason why iAd couldn't have become a more powerful revenue generating part of their platform. Maybe iAd could have performed slightly better if certain policies had been different. But iAd still had to compete with Google and Facebook whom by virtue of reaching effectively everybody, offer a much more attractive value proposition to most advertisers. Apple simply can't compete with that. And every decision Apple would have to make in order to be more competitive would be at cost of harming the user experience of their products, ie. the very thing that makes them able to charge a premium in the first place. Of course, you can argue that maybe they wouldn't take that stance if they weren't so successful in hardware That's not the argument I'm making. At all. My argument is that advertising as a business model is fundamentally incompatible with selling premium hardware products. To be succesful at one means making strategy choices that prevents you from succesful at the other.