That was in 2006. Back then a billion dollars was a lot of money, nowadays it's pre-launch valuation for a startup that has at least one MIT dropoff.

That made me chuckle.

  "And only for macintosh users!
  And only macintosh users who use safari!
  And only macintosh users who use safari who don't change the default search engine!"

Rather more users than that:

> to ensure that it remains the default search engine on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

Indeed the Mac is a rounding error at Apple.

> Back in January of this year, Apple confirmed there were 1.65 billion active Apple devices at the time, with iPhone alone accounting for one billion.

They're only selling 5-6m Macs per quarter. [2] They sold 90m iPhones in Q4 of 2020. Extrapolating from this, roughly speaking, that would mean of the 1.65B Apple devices, 100m are Macs.

[1] https://screenrant.com/android-vs-apple-active-devices-globa...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/263444/sales-of-apple-ma...

> Consider that google purchased YouTube for less than 2 billion

That was a long time ago (15 years ago IIRC).

And back then, YT was:

    a) much smaller than today
    b) certainly not a sure bet moneymaker
    c) a huge infrastructure (especially B/W) money sink

I don't think you are comparing things that are comparable.