They’re in completely different businesses.
Google is a display advertising company that occasionally puts out a better display (Chrome, Android). Apple is in the business of finding and extracting value from hardware markets no one else took seriously.
You can’t even accurately compare Apple to smartphone manufacturers. Companies that make handsets that run Android, Windows Phone, and other operating systems provide hardware, but rarely the full software experience.
Who would you even compare them to as a competitor?
Since smartphone makers let the network provider handle the software, and Apple’s iPhone runs on those networks, a meaningful comparison would take a more detailed and thoughtful breakdown of business structure than the typical “Apple is killing Google” linkbait author feels like writing about.
I don’t even care enough to go into that much detail. But if you’re desperate for a simple comparison of Apple and Google, then you need to look at iAds. Nobody wants to look at iAds, as far as I can tell.
I couldn’t find a breakdown of Apple’s earnings report that shows how much revenue and profit iAds brings in.
But this is what you’d need to look at if you wanted to meaningfully compare the two companies.
