The question is not whether Apple could make a profitable search engine. The question is whether they could make a search engine more profitable than the billions they are getting paid each year by Google to make Google search the default.
If Apple decides to make a search engine and eats $100 billion out of Google's $500 billion profit (made up numbers), Google will just spend back $100 billion (or whatever constitutes a blank warfare check) for year into completely annihilating Apple's presence. They will literally stop people from finding any page that even remotely mentions their 'AppleSearch' and also deprioritize a bunch of other products too unless if you type out, exact word, 'AppleSearch' or whatever it'd be called.
So now you're Apple, here's a question: Will you spend $200 billion fighting back? When will this stop? You're Apple, and this is a stupid move.
Not as profitable as monopoly. Sharing monopoly profit with Google is more profitable for both and loss for the consumers.
Both Apple and Google make less profits if they compete against each other, but consumers benefit from two search engines trying to compete against each other.
Apple does not like to compete. They would rather call it spatial computing and price their product in an astronomical band than risk being seen as yet another VR headset competitor.
They will never make a search engine.
On the other hand, they have already made a search engine. Which you don’t think of as one, and which provides a boost to their ecosystem tie-in.
It absolutely is much harder to make a search engine (at least a good one). The dominance of Google in that space for so long should have made that obvious.
