Ask Slashdot: Could Apple Survive If It Had To Pay a 30% ‘Apple Tax’?
Posted by msmash from the turning-the-tables dept.
They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
Apple is the largest income tax payer in the US. Apple paid a little over 17.4 billion in income taxes to the feds last year. Of course, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the sales tax, licenses, property taxes, etc. that they had to pay.
But you just keep spreading fud, because we know your comment was about “the feels” and not reality.
point 3 is a hymn to tax avoidance. tax avoidance is “legalized” tax evasion for those who can, aka for the rich and powerful.
If you are buying movies from Apple, then the 30% commission makes sense to cover their hosting and bandwidth costs. But you have to pay 30% commission even when you are providing your own hosting and bandwidth, and Apple are only providing payment processing services. 2-3% would be more reasonable in that situation.
The problem with that is the credit card processor is going to charge something like $0.25 + 3% to run the transaction.
I have no idea what typical transaction amounts are nowadays, but in the early days of the app store, $0.99 was by far the most common amount, and transactions over a couple dollars were rare. That’s how we ended up with the 30% rate.
And when the end user has an issue with the app purchase, who do they call, and who pays that call center team wages?
You’re paying for Apple to put your app on a store that their entire iOS user base can access, ie global distribution to a very large group of customers with a high propensity to spend (not least because Apple consumers feel comfortable to make payments via the App Store because they trust Apple to look after their credit card details). You’re also paying for Apple to build funky APIs and hardware capability that enable your app to do funky things. All of that is not accounted for in your 2 to 3%.
POINT 2. Not all digital goods pay 30%, about half pay 15%, which makes the net average 22.5%.
But that is not all profit. For that money, Apple has to pay for datacenter space to manage the distribution of digital goods. It also has to maintain the team that qualifies the digital goods for acceptance into the App Store etc. That means checking for copyright infringement, code quality, geographic regulations, terms of use violations, spyware, malware, data exfiltration, and user monitoring, use of unsupported APIs, bitcoin mining, etc.. That is not free.
Apple already charges a developer access fee just to be allowed to use the store. The only reason to charge 15-30% on top of that is because of greed, useless engineers, and retarded executives. Apple doesn’t have any people of any kind of worth working for them. The world wouldn’t be any different if Apple and everyone working for them sudden and spontaneously combusted, and no one would be missed.
Its a hypothetical question, could apple survive if they had to pay 30% of the revenue (not profit) as tax, its imposing a 30% tax on everything a software company sells through their store, if that was extended to them what would their financial situation be.
Its like saying if company 30% the price of every sale of orange, then posing the question what if that company sales where taxed at 30% as well, then saying oh no that doesn’t count that company also sells apples.
Point 3, if apple allowed people to pr
Didn’t the individual workers pay that income tax? I ask because, if my employer should have been paying tax on my income all this time, I need to fire my accountant.
The share of tax your employer pays on your income is higher than the share you pay yourself, unless you filled out your W-4 really weird.
That’s the company FICA contribution. 6.2% of wages. The witheld income tax comes out of your paycheck. In other words, the company actually pays nothing.
That’s the company FICA contribution. 6.2% of wages. The witheld income tax comes out of your paycheck. In other words, the company actually pays nothing.
^^We found the guy who doesn’t understand how corporate income taxes work.^^
We found the guy who doesn’t understand how corporate income taxes work.
Corporate income tax? Ow! My sides!
You mean corporate profit taxes?
The share of tax your employer pays on your income is higher than the share you pay yourself, unless you filled out your W-4 really weird.
Nope. They pay only the employer portion of Social Security and Medicare, which is exactly the same amount as what you pay. But on top of that, you also pay federal income tax. The only way you could pay less than your employer pays would be if you somehow had so many tax credits that you got money back from the federal government beyond everything that you paid for the year. For example, if somebody earned $2000 and somehow still was able to get a tax credit for installing a $12,000 solar generation sy
Is a 17% tax rate expected? Net income is $97bn as per the summary, that feels low. Federal alone is 21%, and they’re HQ’d in California aren’t they (8.8%)?
Well done, spreading deliberate misinformation in order to accuse someone else of “spreading fud”. Love it when people tell us they are bad faith liars.
No it was about fuck apple. They paid 17.4b? So how much should they have paid then because no doubt that will be the absolute minimised amount using every trick, whistle and move in the book. They famously only paid 9m in the uk in 2021 and Ireland is still waiting on 13b owed. Saying oh they paid this massive amount is fud when its missing a whole lot of other info. A quick google shows they posted 100b income in US so that’s ~17%. What rate do you pay? The same source says the posted nearly 400b worldwid
Yep it’s the same shit with taxes on the rich. They cry that they’re paying 70% of the taxes, which is not only not true (it counts only federal income tax) but they are also running off with 90% of the money, so even if it were true it would be less than their share.
They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
Apple is the largest income tax payer in the US. Apple paid a little over 17.4 billion in income taxes to the feds last year. Of course, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the sales tax, licenses, property taxes, etc. that they had to pay.
But you just keep spreading fud, because we know your comment was about “the feels” and not reality.
The power of Microspft compels him – What he doesn’t realize is his deep seated need to have an enemy to hate. His joy would be fleeting if Apple was eliminated – then the ennui would set in as he has to find a different company to hate with a deep abiding passion.
Thew whole subject here is a non-sequitur anyhow. Why in the name of the hot steaming taint of Beelzebub would Apple have to pay themselves a tax?
The answer then is yes, they would survive, because they are sending that 30 percent tax – to
Apple is the largest tax payer because it earns a LOT of money, it doesn’t address the statement that apple doesn’t pay regular tax at all it just deflects it.
From the net income of 97 billion 17.4 billion that is 18% tax if they where a person they would should be paying 37% tax from here https://www.irs.gov/filing/fed… [irs.gov].
That being said of course they would survive. You pay tax on profit, although regular people can’t deduct cost necessary for work like travel, clothing that is required for work, I am not
If they can’t survive paying taxes like the rest of us, then they should die.
They got some tax wizardry deal with Cupertino where Cupertino surrenders 35% of sales tax generated by apple back to apple. https://appleinsider.com/artic… [appleinsider.com]
Good FP, though I’m surprised the Fanbois didn’t mod you a troll. You even got the appropriate Funny mod for it.
However, I think this is actually a troll AskSlashdot: “Look not at the mirror.” (Especially important warning for certain fake Republican politicians these years?)
However, I also think you raise an important question. I’m not saying that corporate cancers should be taxed to death, but just taxed to the point of being less cancerous. So here’s the idea: How about a progressive profits tax mostly l
Cost of goods sold isn’t paying part of revenue to “third parties”? Salaries aren’t “third parties”? Payments to utilities aren’t to “third parties”?
I think the complaint here is that it’s a fixed percentage, rather than a fixed price. I would tend to support that argument – instead of a percent, if Apple just charged $1 per install or whatever, that would be more like “this bolt costs $1 each.”
Folks don’t like this though, see how Spotify and Epic are screaming about the Core Tech Fee which is a fixed price… so basically this is just people screaming because it’s Apple.
Critical difference here. All the other entities pay those costs too. They’re paying for their own salaries, utilities, taxes, etc. In addition to all those, they are also giving a 30% cut of the revenue to Apple, because reasons.
The contracts with the various distribution gatekeepers also have a “favored nation” style clause so people can’t charge less elsewhere, or otherwise take steps to mitigate the damage done by that extra 30%. If they sell on multiple app stores the rate on various platforms (Apple,
Cost of goods sold isn’t paying part of revenue to “third parties”? Salaries aren’t “third parties”? Payments to utilities aren’t to “third parties”?
Uh, just a handful of postal addresses in The Netherlands host 1000s of large corporation’s IP rights holders. A good share of every Apple product or service sold is forwarded by Apple Inc to Apple BV in the Netherlands which owns all Apple IP. Zero tax in the Netherlands for income on IP.
The same goes for their data centers, storage, stores, you name it. The
So, in a related case, the NAR/MLS people had to pay $418mn for price fixing commissions on house sales. I hereby proclaim that Apple and any other walled garden pay system will end up settling similar in the future for many many more billions.
That Apple expects a 30% cut for doing essentially nothing is about as fair as AirBNB getting a 20% cut for doing essentially nothing, Uber for doing the same, and countless other examples.
There will be a reckoning, and it can’t come soon enough.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
Just make a good mobile website and give Apple the finger.
App vs website – usability.
The web interface sucks compared to the app in most cases, particularly on mobile.
And clearly that’s Apple’s fault for taxing Patreon’s app, removing funds that could go towards paying web developers. Right?
I’m not sure if you threw the best web developers against the problem, you’d result in a web app that was pleasant to use in comparison to a native one.
“pleasant to use” is in the eye of the user. But one major advantage of a web based interface is I can use all the tools/add-ons on the web browser to control data mining. TOO MANY APPS come with all kinds of ‘built-in shitware’, often inadvertently, with the frameworks and reusable code.
Now I admit to being an old fart. But I generally DISlike Apps, and much prefer to do stuff from my computer, with its full-size keyboard, large monitor, and much greater visibility over what’s going on. The proliferati
Web browsers on your phone aren’t equivalent to web browsers on your PC. Phone browsers can’t make use of all the hardware, whether Patreon needs access or not is irrelevant.
Apps that were literally just the website wrapped in an app-like package were very popular for a time. They were also the shittiest things in the world. They looked bad. They performed bad. Most desktop versions of sites don’t like to work on phones in one way or another. And most mobile versions of a website, look even worse. Hence nat
I guess that works if you never leave your mom’s basement.
The rest of us like to be out and about and want to do stuff when we are.
Uh… I bought my first computer in October 1978, and have owned one continuously since. How old are you? How old are your parents?
So fine, use apps if you want. Don’t complain when those apps steal information. Don’t complain about Apple or Google extracting fees to support their infrastructure used to run those apps, both the operating system and the operations of the store. TNSTAAFL
Can’t their developers git gud and write a website with a better UI?
Can’t their developers git gud and write a website with a better UI?
They are required to use the latest and greatest software to create the most wicked looking web site possible. Usability has no place in that regard.
It feels like 90% of apps are just a website anyways.
There’s not much different if the doesn’t do something fancy like image manipulation or spreadsheets. It’s the obsession with eye-candy that often F’s up such sites. You don’t need buttons that bounce like DD’s.
They need an app so they can get paid through Apple.
So don’t get paid through Apple. The only way things will get better is if everyone takes a stand against Apple. But sadly, I don’t see that happening because Apple knows how to divide the development community. Same applies to Google; the promise of their vast number of customers is too alluring.
They’re probably going to do what most subscription services do, and force people to subscribe or renew their subscriptions outside of the iOS app to avoid the 30% Apple Tax.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
as a dev I can hardly complain if someone wants to pay to embed their website into an “app”.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
Because stupid morons in its management saw the success of TikTok and gimped the website. They also added “free tier” and renamed “patrons” to “subscribers”. So now the management can’t walk back that decision without looking like morons.
If Apple is going to pay this mythical 30% tax, what’s in it for Apple? People put apps in the app store because they get a lot of infrastructure and other stuff for the money. Is it too much? That’s a different argument.
> People put apps in the app store because they get a lot of infrastructure and other stuff for the money
That’s a good argument absent a monopoly on software distribution.
Patreon could absolutely handle its own package distribution but they’re not allowed to.
And in this case I very much doubt there was ever a single user who searched the app store for “crowdfunding platforms” and then found Patreon and then looked for creators to support. It’s exactly the opposite.
Competition vs. Iron Fist is the issue.
There is an infrastructure angle, but it’s a small part of it; what publishers get when they join an appstore is: 1) Purchase visibility – people find stuff they haven’t bought yet in one place, showing up in search 2) Managability – people who have bought something manage stuff they’ve installed in one place 3) Permissions – Some awful vendors make it hard to install stuff on devices they sell outside of the app store 4) Sometimes some software services – Backup and migration of save data, user chat, achieveme
Apple’s tax is the R&D and operating costs for the whole ecosystem.
Why does everyone feel entitled to an app that freeloads on their system? Fire up a website ffs. I can’t buy Kindle books in the Kindle app, and yet I still buy Kindle books. Wowsers.
Your argument would work if Apple didn’t prevent app sideloading.
Apple’s tax is the R&D and operating costs for the whole ecosystem.
People forget that before Apple’s iphone, and I mean literally *RIGHT* before – one day prior to the iTunes store – the “30% apple tax” was in fact a “100%+ cellular carrier tax”
In one example Verizon and Cingular had two offerings, one for BREW apps on some qualcomm feature phones, and another based on a Java runtime specifically for feature phones.
As as software author we were required to SELL Verizon the royalty rights in a one-time offering. That is to say they made a single purchase with us for the righ
Why does everyone seem to think that people are wanting a free ride? You literally have to pay Apple $99 a year to be on the App Store. No one is complaining about that, they pay it because it’s the fee that Apple up front says that being on the App Store costs. It’s the double dipping/gouging that’s the problem.
Not a fan boi but disclaimer, I have always used Macs (Windows and, I have a couple of linux servers) and I like them for a reason. Not blind, not liking everything. I did switch from Galaxy to iPhone and I love the lack of malware so far that I can detect. Look, while the headline sounds interesting let’s face it. Yes they would survive, they would just change the business model so that users pay for it. Maybe it would be less profitable. I agree not being able to buy books from Kindle on the iPhone is a pain (which also uses 1 mm tall letters, another anti-user thing) and 30% is much for a book. Though if Amazon charged 30% maybe bookstores would still be a thing. Especially if I am paying Amazon like $10 a month for Kindle Unlimited, if Apple asked for 30% of the price of those rented books too. And I hate the way iTunes makes it so hard (impossible?) to easily keep your own music on your phone, at least for a casual infrequent user. The answer is this model arose when other companies were doing the same thing.
I remember when Japan’s NTT created “I-Mode” which was like a Yahoo for your feature phone with menus navigated by numbers. Around the mid 90s I think. It was fabulously successful and everyone paid through the nose for the platform. It was the cyber-real estate dream. One company (many more but I remember Toppan the printing company) made a mall homepage and companies could by “buildings” on it. Flash forward some decades. Is 30% and utter lock-in reasonable? Are we actually perpetuating the (stupid in a decentralized era) cyber real estate concept? I don’t know, at least maybe 30% is too high for media. Being into libre software I would say locked-in DRM formats should be outlawed and APIs should be provide to allow interoperability for personal libraries/converters like with Calibre.
Are the people saying no actually the one’s who want to compete with them? Yes. Hello Epic and EU. Is the EU right? Mostly yeah, especially on privacy and consent, I love it, but they also have a clearly stated goal of taking down big tech (Microsoft, Google, Apple) ascendancy in the EU to create opportunities for competition by EU companies. I don’t know how nice a MacBook Pro I could get (shopping for my next one) if Apple hadn’t made its billions on music, but whatever.
I’m exhausted by the super-hyped slanted idiotic headlines of which this is one of them. And the posts of people with agendas. Yes, flash news, super huge multibillion dollar companies make use of every tax trick they can find. Please treat slashdotters as being intelligent. At least the headline could look at “Can any company under 1M in revenue make money on the App Store?” I personally would be more interested in that.
The other side of your post, and to flip the stupid headline as you said is:
Could many app companies survive if they didn’t have the Apple ecosystem, and many are surviving and thriving despite the 30% “Apple tax”?
It’s not an “Apple Tax”. Apple is a distributor of applications on the ecosystem they themselves built. Typical distributor rates range around 20-30%, with some as high 40% [massoninternational.com] in other industries. In that context, 30% is highly reasonable, as a distributor of goods and services.
I’m not a
Sure, but those other distributors don’t prevent you from switching distributors. With Apple, you have no choice over which distributor to pick.
AND those distributers don’t charge an upfront fee just to consider using their services before ever even having the product ready.
I’m sorry, since when? Does Apple keep you from releasing on the Google Play Store? Or a game on Steam, or Epic, or XBox or Playstation? No they do not.
Or is your point that you want to have multiple distributors to sell software on Apple products like the iPhone and iPad? There is literally no reason why Apple should be forced to do that, as Apple has a user base because of their design choices and quality of apps in how they curate what’s on there. You don’t have to publish on iOS, go self-publis
If they’re doing something illegal, fine them. If they keep doing something illegal, keep fining them and fine them more.
If they’re doing something legal (no matter how distasteful we find it), we have no right to take their money.
On what basis do you say “we have no right”?
What’s permitted now may not be permitted later – that’s a matter for discussion and planning, and we should potentially use law and policy for useful ends.
We (here in the United States) don’t tax business entities just because they’re successful. Theoretically, we do everything we can to support, not impede free enterprise. Unless you’re suggesting we federalize Apple?
We don’t fine-craft entire taxes usually for specific entities, but policy interests can lead to negotiations and pressure on various topics on some companies. We have a general interest in most businesses being successful, and in being generally a decent business environment, but it’s nothing like a commitment to free enterprise principles nor even to be generally hands off.
There’s a lot of ground between nationalising a company and either giving it backrubs or leaving it entirely alone. We’ve been on that
You do realise that the reason “Apple tax” was in scare quotes was because it isn’t a tax in the sense of government imposition, right?
You do realise that despite “Apple tax” being in what you call ‘scare quotes’, TFA is ALL ABOUT a tax in the sense of government imposition, right? Yes, TFA describes Apple’s existing structure as exacting what they would also refer to as an “Apple tax”. Wonderful, imprecise wording, that. TFA is all about punishing Apple because they employ business practices of questionable ethical integrity.
Oh, and I put the word “idiot” in quotes because it isn’t a definition in the sense a professional psychologist
I’m insulted by the suggestion that I might have read TFA. This is/.
Could Apple survive an “Apple tax?” Of course. There’s a simple financial method to being able to deal with increased costs of doing business. It’s called raising prices. All of the companies subject to the “apple tax” have raised their prices high enough that they can still operate and make margins.
If the price of the “Apple Tax” vanishes tomorrow or goes down to let’s say 5%, then there may be downward pressure for pricing on apps…especially those competing with each other, trying to grab each other’s market share. They will set the price somewhere between as high as they can for consumers to accept, and as low as they can to make the margins the CEO promised the board.
For apps that don’t raise prices, by and large an apple tax removal means more money for their venture-capital investors and shareholders. A handful of small independent developers will certainly benefit, but the vast majority of the money goes to well-established corporations running highly monetizing apps (e.g. Match Group).
The thing being of course, that if an app is popular enough, and is pricing appropriately to even manage to be profitable on the App Store, Apple has a tendency to then take whatever is provided by those apps and integrate them into the OS for “free” to the user. Which of course the original popular app cannot compete with because they’re already having to price an additional 30% higher to cover the fee that Apple takes. A fee which gives Apple funding to develop competitors to those same apps they’re cha
During the Eisenhower administration, corporate tax rates were 30% to 52%. Companies thrived, people could afford a family home on one salary, and college education was in reach of just about everyone without going into decades-long debt.
When people say they long for the “good ‘ol days”, remind them of this tax rate.
We’ll be back to those tax rates in about 50 years or so. The US abandoned fiscal responsibility decades ago. The last president to balance the budget was clinton, and as soon as he stepped down from office, the next president spent the surplus on a tax cut (Bush). Since then, neither party has been anywhere close to fiscally responsible.
When the US exhausts the world’s willingness to lend it money, we will have to raise taxes, inflate the debt away, or both. But it wont happen until the bo
That was coupled with massive infrastructure and consumer spending. The spending was the reason for the hot economy.
Taxes only affect the rich, so cutting taxes can’t stimulate the economy. But spending on infrastructure stimulates the middle class to spend.
Apple is one of several tech companies that is jyst too big. They have too much market power. If the governments (collective) were doing their jobs, Apple would be broken up, along with Alphabet, Microsoft, et al.
“Too big to fail” (or whatever “…to (ignore/fight back/etc.)” might be) means that “too big” has failed, and yes, it needs regulating.
Nobody is forced to pay any âoeApple Taxâ. You pay for in-app purchases made from within an Apple Device. Netflix, Amazon etc donâ(TM)t pay a penny to Apple. If worked for multiple companies whose income came from sales of software and services to iPhone and android users and who didnâ(TM)t pay a penny to Apple.
Go back twenty years when it was impossible to sell any software without paying at least half to the store.
So….you make your parasitic business off Apple’s back and don’t want to pay up?
1). Fuck you. 2). Whose fault was that?
Nobody told you to go out and make your business dependent on Apple. You did that all on your own.
Oh fuck off. Seriously. The biggest company I worked for was Citrix. Involved in the thin client for iPhone and iPad. Guess how much we paid to Apple. 99 dollars a year for the development tools.
The ones complaining are the middlemen who want to make money from the work of artists, musicians, authors etc. who would be better off selling through Apple directly.
Software is “code once, sell many” Hardware requires much, much more.
Software is not hardware.
Yeah, that’s why it’s porous and full of security holes, as well as bugs (particularly in all of Apple’s software!)
Apple: a trillion dollar company with thousands of engineers housed in a multi-billion dollar campus; spends $0 on Q/A and testing of its software.
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They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
Apple is the largest income tax payer in the US. Apple paid a little over 17.4 billion in income taxes to the feds last year. Of course, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the sales tax, licenses, property taxes, etc. that they had to pay.
But you just keep spreading fud, because we know your comment was about “the feels” and not reality.
point 3 is a hymn to tax avoidance. tax avoidance is “legalized” tax evasion for those who can, aka for the rich and powerful.
If you are buying movies from Apple, then the 30% commission makes sense to cover their hosting and bandwidth costs. But you have to pay 30% commission even when you are providing your own hosting and bandwidth, and Apple are only providing payment processing services. 2-3% would be more reasonable in that situation.
The problem with that is the credit card processor is going to charge something like $0.25 + 3% to run the transaction.
I have no idea what typical transaction amounts are nowadays, but in the early days of the app store, $0.99 was by far the most common amount, and transactions over a couple dollars were rare. That’s how we ended up with the 30% rate.
And when the end user has an issue with the app purchase, who do they call, and who pays that call center team wages?
You’re paying for Apple to put your app on a store that their entire iOS user base can access, ie global distribution to a very large group of customers with a high propensity to spend (not least because Apple consumers feel comfortable to make payments via the App Store because they trust Apple to look after their credit card details). You’re also paying for Apple to build funky APIs and hardware capability that enable your app to do funky things. All of that is not accounted for in your 2 to 3%.
POINT 2. Not all digital goods pay 30%, about half pay 15%, which makes the net average 22.5%.
But that is not all profit. For that money, Apple has to pay for datacenter space to manage the distribution of digital goods. It also has to maintain the team that qualifies the digital goods for acceptance into the App Store etc. That means checking for copyright infringement, code quality, geographic regulations, terms of use violations, spyware, malware, data exfiltration, and user monitoring, use of unsupported APIs, bitcoin mining, etc.. That is not free.
Apple already charges a developer access fee just to be allowed to use the store. The only reason to charge 15-30% on top of that is because of greed, useless engineers, and retarded executives. Apple doesn’t have any people of any kind of worth working for them. The world wouldn’t be any different if Apple and everyone working for them sudden and spontaneously combusted, and no one would be missed.
Its a hypothetical question, could apple survive if they had to pay 30% of the revenue (not profit) as tax, its imposing a 30% tax on everything a software company sells through their store, if that was extended to them what would their financial situation be.
Its like saying if company 30% the price of every sale of orange, then posing the question what if that company sales where taxed at 30% as well, then saying oh no that doesn’t count that company also sells apples.
Point 3, if apple allowed people to pr
Didn’t the individual workers pay that income tax? I ask because, if my employer should have been paying tax on my income all this time, I need to fire my accountant.
The share of tax your employer pays on your income is higher than the share you pay yourself, unless you filled out your W-4 really weird.
That’s the company FICA contribution. 6.2% of wages. The witheld income tax comes out of your paycheck. In other words, the company actually pays nothing.
That’s the company FICA contribution. 6.2% of wages. The witheld income tax comes out of your paycheck. In other words, the company actually pays nothing.
^^We found the guy who doesn’t understand how corporate income taxes work.^^
We found the guy who doesn’t understand how corporate income taxes work.
Corporate income tax? Ow! My sides!
You mean corporate profit taxes?
The share of tax your employer pays on your income is higher than the share you pay yourself, unless you filled out your W-4 really weird.
Nope. They pay only the employer portion of Social Security and Medicare, which is exactly the same amount as what you pay. But on top of that, you also pay federal income tax. The only way you could pay less than your employer pays would be if you somehow had so many tax credits that you got money back from the federal government beyond everything that you paid for the year. For example, if somebody earned $2000 and somehow still was able to get a tax credit for installing a $12,000 solar generation sy
Is a 17% tax rate expected? Net income is $97bn as per the summary, that feels low. Federal alone is 21%, and they’re HQ’d in California aren’t they (8.8%)?
Well done, spreading deliberate misinformation in order to accuse someone else of “spreading fud”. Love it when people tell us they are bad faith liars.
No it was about fuck apple. They paid 17.4b? So how much should they have paid then because no doubt that will be the absolute minimised amount using every trick, whistle and move in the book. They famously only paid 9m in the uk in 2021 and Ireland is still waiting on 13b owed. Saying oh they paid this massive amount is fud when its missing a whole lot of other info. A quick google shows they posted 100b income in US so that’s ~17%. What rate do you pay? The same source says the posted nearly 400b worldwid
Yep it’s the same shit with taxes on the rich. They cry that they’re paying 70% of the taxes, which is not only not true (it counts only federal income tax) but they are also running off with 90% of the money, so even if it were true it would be less than their share.
They couldn’t even survive if they paid regular tax.
Apple is the largest income tax payer in the US. Apple paid a little over 17.4 billion in income taxes to the feds last year. Of course, that doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the sales tax, licenses, property taxes, etc. that they had to pay.
But you just keep spreading fud, because we know your comment was about “the feels” and not reality.
The power of Microspft compels him – What he doesn’t realize is his deep seated need to have an enemy to hate. His joy would be fleeting if Apple was eliminated – then the ennui would set in as he has to find a different company to hate with a deep abiding passion.
Thew whole subject here is a non-sequitur anyhow. Why in the name of the hot steaming taint of Beelzebub would Apple have to pay themselves a tax?
The answer then is yes, they would survive, because they are sending that 30 percent tax – to
Apple is the largest tax payer because it earns a LOT of money, it doesn’t address the statement that apple doesn’t pay regular tax at all it just deflects it.
From the net income of 97 billion 17.4 billion that is 18% tax if they where a person they would should be paying 37% tax from here https://www.irs.gov/filing/fed… [irs.gov].
That being said of course they would survive. You pay tax on profit, although regular people can’t deduct cost necessary for work like travel, clothing that is required for work, I am not
If they can’t survive paying taxes like the rest of us, then they should die.
They got some tax wizardry deal with Cupertino where Cupertino surrenders 35% of sales tax generated by apple back to apple.
https://appleinsider.com/artic… [appleinsider.com]
Good FP, though I’m surprised the Fanbois didn’t mod you a troll. You even got the appropriate Funny mod for it.
However, I think this is actually a troll AskSlashdot: “Look not at the mirror.” (Especially important warning for certain fake Republican politicians these years?)
However, I also think you raise an important question. I’m not saying that corporate cancers should be taxed to death, but just taxed to the point of being less cancerous. So here’s the idea: How about a progressive profits tax mostly l
Cost of goods sold isn’t paying part of revenue to “third parties”? Salaries aren’t “third parties”? Payments to utilities aren’t to “third parties”?
I think the complaint here is that it’s a fixed percentage, rather than a fixed price. I would tend to support that argument – instead of a percent, if Apple just charged $1 per install or whatever, that would be more like “this bolt costs $1 each.”
Folks don’t like this though, see how Spotify and Epic are screaming about the Core Tech Fee which is a fixed price… so basically this is just people screaming because it’s Apple.
Critical difference here. All the other entities pay those costs too. They’re paying for their own salaries, utilities, taxes, etc. In addition to all those, they are also giving a 30% cut of the revenue to Apple, because reasons.
The contracts with the various distribution gatekeepers also have a “favored nation” style clause so people can’t charge less elsewhere, or otherwise take steps to mitigate the damage done by that extra 30%. If they sell on multiple app stores the rate on various platforms (Apple,
Cost of goods sold isn’t paying part of revenue to “third parties”? Salaries aren’t “third parties”? Payments to utilities aren’t to “third parties”?
Uh, just a handful of postal addresses in The Netherlands host 1000s of large corporation’s IP rights holders. A good share of every Apple product or service sold is forwarded by Apple Inc to Apple BV in the Netherlands which owns all Apple IP. Zero tax in the Netherlands for income on IP.
The same goes for their data centers, storage, stores, you name it. The
So, in a related case, the NAR/MLS people had to pay $418mn for price fixing commissions on house sales. I hereby proclaim that Apple and any other walled garden pay system will end up settling similar in the future for many many more billions.
That Apple expects a 30% cut for doing essentially nothing is about as fair as AirBNB getting a 20% cut for doing essentially nothing, Uber for doing the same, and countless other examples.
There will be a reckoning, and it can’t come soon enough.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
Just make a good mobile website and give Apple the finger.
App vs website – usability.
The web interface sucks compared to the app in most cases, particularly on mobile.
And clearly that’s Apple’s fault for taxing Patreon’s app, removing funds that could go towards paying web developers. Right?
I’m not sure if you threw the best web developers against the problem, you’d result in a web app that was pleasant to use in comparison to a native one.
“pleasant to use” is in the eye of the user. But one major advantage of a web based interface is I can use all the tools/add-ons on the web browser to control data mining. TOO MANY APPS come with all kinds of ‘built-in shitware’, often inadvertently, with the frameworks and reusable code.
Now I admit to being an old fart. But I generally DISlike Apps, and much prefer to do stuff from my computer, with its full-size keyboard, large monitor, and much greater visibility over what’s going on. The proliferati
Web browsers on your phone aren’t equivalent to web browsers on your PC. Phone browsers can’t make use of all the hardware, whether Patreon needs access or not is irrelevant.
Apps that were literally just the website wrapped in an app-like package were very popular for a time. They were also the shittiest things in the world. They looked bad. They performed bad. Most desktop versions of sites don’t like to work on phones in one way or another. And most mobile versions of a website, look even worse. Hence nat
I guess that works if you never leave your mom’s basement.
The rest of us like to be out and about and want to do stuff when we are.
Uh… I bought my first computer in October 1978, and have owned one continuously since. How old are you? How old are your parents?
So fine, use apps if you want. Don’t complain when those apps steal information. Don’t complain about Apple or Google extracting fees to support their infrastructure used to run those apps, both the operating system and the operations of the store. TNSTAAFL
Can’t their developers git gud and write a website with a better UI?
Can’t their developers git gud and write a website with a better UI?
They are required to use the latest and greatest software to create the most wicked looking web site possible. Usability has no place in that regard.
It feels like 90% of apps are just a website anyways.
There’s not much different if the doesn’t do something fancy like image manipulation or spreadsheets. It’s the obsession with eye-candy that often F’s up such sites. You don’t need buttons that bounce like DD’s.
They need an app so they can get paid through Apple.
So don’t get paid through Apple. The only way things will get better is if everyone takes a stand against Apple. But sadly, I don’t see that happening because Apple knows how to divide the development community. Same applies to Google; the promise of their vast number of customers is too alluring.
They’re probably going to do what most subscription services do, and force people to subscribe or renew their subscriptions outside of the iOS app to avoid the 30% Apple Tax.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
as a dev I can hardly complain if someone wants to pay to embed their website into an “app”.
Why does Patreon need an app? Don’t they have a web site?
Because stupid morons in its management saw the success of TikTok and gimped the website. They also added “free tier” and renamed “patrons” to “subscribers”. So now the management can’t walk back that decision without looking like morons.
If Apple is going to pay this mythical 30% tax, what’s in it for Apple? People put apps in the app store because they get a lot of infrastructure and other stuff for the money. Is it too much? That’s a different argument.
> People put apps in the app store because they get a lot of infrastructure and other stuff for the money
That’s a good argument absent a monopoly on software distribution.
Patreon could absolutely handle its own package distribution but they’re not allowed to.
And in this case I very much doubt there was ever a single user who searched the app store for “crowdfunding platforms” and then found Patreon and then looked for creators to support. It’s exactly the opposite.
Competition vs. Iron Fist is the issue.
There is an infrastructure angle, but it’s a small part of it; what publishers get when they join an appstore is:
1) Purchase visibility – people find stuff they haven’t bought yet in one place, showing up in search
2) Managability – people who have bought something manage stuff they’ve installed in one place
3) Permissions – Some awful vendors make it hard to install stuff on devices they sell outside of the app store
4) Sometimes some software services – Backup and migration of save data, user chat, achieveme
Apple’s tax is the R&D and operating costs for the whole ecosystem.
Why does everyone feel entitled to an app that freeloads on their system? Fire up a website ffs. I can’t buy Kindle books in the Kindle app, and yet I still buy Kindle books. Wowsers.
Your argument would work if Apple didn’t prevent app sideloading.
Apple’s tax is the R&D and operating costs for the whole ecosystem.
People forget that before Apple’s iphone, and I mean literally *RIGHT* before – one day prior to the iTunes store – the “30% apple tax” was in fact a “100%+ cellular carrier tax”
In one example Verizon and Cingular had two offerings, one for BREW apps on some qualcomm feature phones, and another based on a Java runtime specifically for feature phones.
As as software author we were required to SELL Verizon the royalty rights in a one-time offering.
That is to say they made a single purchase with us for the righ
Why does everyone seem to think that people are wanting a free ride? You literally have to pay Apple $99 a year to be on the App Store. No one is complaining about that, they pay it because it’s the fee that Apple up front says that being on the App Store costs. It’s the double dipping/gouging that’s the problem.
Not a fan boi but disclaimer, I have always used Macs (Windows and, I have a couple of linux servers) and I like them for a reason. Not blind, not liking everything. I did switch from Galaxy to iPhone and I love the lack of malware so far that I can detect. Look, while the headline sounds interesting let’s face it. Yes they would survive, they would just change the business model so that users pay for it. Maybe it would be less profitable. I agree not being able to buy books from Kindle on the iPhone is a pain (which also uses 1 mm tall letters, another anti-user thing) and 30% is much for a book. Though if Amazon charged 30% maybe bookstores would still be a thing. Especially if I am paying Amazon like $10 a month for Kindle Unlimited, if Apple asked for 30% of the price of those rented books too. And I hate the way iTunes makes it so hard (impossible?) to easily keep your own music on your phone, at least for a casual infrequent user. The answer is this model arose when other companies were doing the same thing.
I remember when Japan’s NTT created “I-Mode” which was like a Yahoo for your feature phone with menus navigated by numbers. Around the mid 90s I think. It was fabulously successful and everyone paid through the nose for the platform. It was the cyber-real estate dream. One company (many more but I remember Toppan the printing company) made a mall homepage and companies could by “buildings” on it. Flash forward some decades. Is 30% and utter lock-in reasonable? Are we actually perpetuating the (stupid in a decentralized era) cyber real estate concept? I don’t know, at least maybe 30% is too high for media. Being into libre software I would say locked-in DRM formats should be outlawed and APIs should be provide to allow interoperability for personal libraries/converters like with Calibre.
Are the people saying no actually the one’s who want to compete with them? Yes. Hello Epic and EU. Is the EU right? Mostly yeah, especially on privacy and consent, I love it, but they also have a clearly stated goal of taking down big tech (Microsoft, Google, Apple) ascendancy in the EU to create opportunities for competition by EU companies. I don’t know how nice a MacBook Pro I could get (shopping for my next one) if Apple hadn’t made its billions on music, but whatever.
I’m exhausted by the super-hyped slanted idiotic headlines of which this is one of them. And the posts of people with agendas. Yes, flash news, super huge multibillion dollar companies make use of every tax trick they can find. Please treat slashdotters as being intelligent. At least the headline could look at “Can any company under 1M in revenue make money on the App Store?” I personally would be more interested in that.
The other side of your post, and to flip the stupid headline as you said is:
Could many app companies survive if they didn’t have the Apple ecosystem, and many are surviving and thriving despite the 30% “Apple tax”?
It’s not an “Apple Tax”. Apple is a distributor of applications on the ecosystem they themselves built. Typical distributor rates range around 20-30%, with some as high 40% [massoninternational.com] in other industries. In that context, 30% is highly reasonable, as a distributor of goods and services.
I’m not a
Sure, but those other distributors don’t prevent you from switching distributors. With Apple, you have no choice over which distributor to pick.
AND those distributers don’t charge an upfront fee just to consider using their services before ever even having the product ready.
I’m sorry, since when? Does Apple keep you from releasing on the Google Play Store? Or a game on Steam, or Epic, or XBox or Playstation? No they do not.
Or is your point that you want to have multiple distributors to sell software on Apple products like the iPhone and iPad? There is literally no reason why Apple should be forced to do that, as Apple has a user base because of their design choices and quality of apps in how they curate what’s on there. You don’t have to publish on iOS, go self-publis
If they’re doing something illegal, fine them. If they keep doing something illegal, keep fining them and fine them more.
If they’re doing something legal (no matter how distasteful we find it), we have no right to take their money.
On what basis do you say “we have no right”?
What’s permitted now may not be permitted later – that’s a matter for discussion and planning, and we should potentially use law and policy for useful ends.
We (here in the United States) don’t tax business entities just because they’re successful. Theoretically, we do everything we can to support, not impede free enterprise. Unless you’re suggesting we federalize Apple?
We don’t fine-craft entire taxes usually for specific entities, but policy interests can lead to negotiations and pressure on various topics on some companies. We have a general interest in most businesses being successful, and in being generally a decent business environment, but it’s nothing like a commitment to free enterprise principles nor even to be generally hands off.
There’s a lot of ground between nationalising a company and either giving it backrubs or leaving it entirely alone. We’ve been on that
You do realise that the reason “Apple tax” was in scare quotes was because it isn’t a tax in the sense of government imposition, right?
You do realise that despite “Apple tax” being in what you call ‘scare quotes’, TFA is ALL ABOUT a tax in the sense of government imposition, right? Yes, TFA describes Apple’s existing structure as exacting what they would also refer to as an “Apple tax”. Wonderful, imprecise wording, that. TFA is all about punishing Apple because they employ business practices of questionable ethical integrity.
Oh, and I put the word “idiot” in quotes because it isn’t a definition in the sense a professional psychologist
I’m insulted by the suggestion that I might have read TFA. This is /.
Could Apple survive an “Apple tax?” Of course. There’s a simple financial method to being able to deal with increased costs of doing business. It’s called raising prices. All of the companies subject to the “apple tax” have raised their prices high enough that they can still operate and make margins.
If the price of the “Apple Tax” vanishes tomorrow or goes down to let’s say 5%, then there may be downward pressure for pricing on apps…especially those competing with each other, trying to grab each other’s market share. They will set the price somewhere between as high as they can for consumers to accept, and as low as they can to make the margins the CEO promised the board.
For apps that don’t raise prices, by and large an apple tax removal means more money for their venture-capital investors and shareholders. A handful of small independent developers will certainly benefit, but the vast majority of the money goes to well-established corporations running highly monetizing apps (e.g. Match Group).
The thing being of course, that if an app is popular enough, and is pricing appropriately to even manage to be profitable on the App Store, Apple has a tendency to then take whatever is provided by those apps and integrate them into the OS for “free” to the user. Which of course the original popular app cannot compete with because they’re already having to price an additional 30% higher to cover the fee that Apple takes. A fee which gives Apple funding to develop competitors to those same apps they’re cha
During the Eisenhower administration, corporate tax rates were 30% to 52%. Companies thrived, people could afford a family home on one salary, and college education was in reach of just about everyone without going into decades-long debt.
When people say they long for the “good ‘ol days”, remind them of this tax rate.
We’ll be back to those tax rates in about 50 years or so. The US abandoned fiscal responsibility decades ago. The last president to balance the budget was clinton, and as soon as he stepped down from office, the next president spent the surplus on a tax cut (Bush). Since then, neither party has been anywhere close to fiscally responsible.
When the US exhausts the world’s willingness to lend it money, we will have to raise taxes, inflate the debt away, or both. But it wont happen until the bo
That was coupled with massive infrastructure and consumer spending. The spending was the reason for the hot economy.
Taxes only affect the rich, so cutting taxes can’t stimulate the economy. But spending on infrastructure stimulates the middle class to spend.
Apple is one of several tech companies that is jyst too big. They have too much market power. If the governments (collective) were doing their jobs, Apple would be broken up, along with Alphabet, Microsoft, et al.
“Too big to fail” (or whatever “…to (ignore/fight back/etc.)” might be) means that “too big” has failed, and yes, it needs regulating.
Nobody is forced to pay any âoeApple Taxâ. You pay for in-app purchases made from within an Apple Device. Netflix, Amazon etc donâ(TM)t pay a penny to Apple. If worked for multiple companies whose income came from sales of software and services to iPhone and android users and who didnâ(TM)t pay a penny to Apple.
Go back twenty years when it was impossible to sell any software without paying at least half to the store.
So….you make your parasitic business off Apple’s back and don’t want to pay up?
1). Fuck you.
2). Whose fault was that?
Nobody told you to go out and make your business dependent on Apple. You did that all on your own.
Oh fuck off. Seriously. The biggest company I worked for was Citrix. Involved in the thin client for iPhone and iPad. Guess how much we paid to Apple. 99 dollars a year for the development tools.
The ones complaining are the middlemen who want to make money from the work of artists, musicians, authors etc. who would be better off selling through Apple directly.
Software is “code once, sell many”
Hardware requires much, much more.
Software is not hardware.
Yeah, that’s why it’s porous and full of security holes, as well as bugs (particularly in all of Apple’s software!)
Apple: a trillion dollar company with thousands of engineers housed in a multi-billion dollar campus; spends $0 on Q/A and testing of its software.