You mean the one that accepts a $20,000,000,000 check from Google every year to support and further entrench their power?

The one that has a 20% smartphone marketshare worldwide?

The one that has agreed to buy a white-labelled Gemini to help them finally get an AI assistant?

In our HN bubble, where most people are high-income (heck, most of us have enough secondhand iPhones to make sure our parents and grandparents are blue-bubble too) and a lot of us are American it's easy to think this is at least a 2-horse race, if not an outright Apple win. But worldwide, Apple is not an important factor in Google's dominance.

And they only challenge Google in a few ways, none of which strategically threaten them. They enhance Google's dominance in advertising with the Search deal and, whether intentional or just out of cheapness, by making their offerings like iCloud uncompetitive on the free tier. iCloud has had a 5GB total storage cap since it launched 15 years ago, for instance.

Competition would look like them putting momentum behind a Google competitor for search/advertising (including perhaps a homegrown search engine) and for AI, making their mail offering more powerful, adding a serious and compelling business productivity offering (replace Gmail/Calendar/Docs, and no, the thing they announced a few months ago is still a joke).

Of course, I have zero expectation they'll ever do any of that, I'm just pointing out what it would look like if Apple had any intention on competing with Google. Apple sees Google as a customer who pays them for eyeballs, allowing them to outsource the dirty work of privacy invasion that goes into advertising. Google also saves Apple a lot of hard work in building and running web properties and server infra -- work that Apple has proven really bad at time and time again.