Apple has also failed in their own advertising efforts (iAd) and additionally failed to catch up in the software service business (almost all of the mass market services are monetized via advertising). Their privacy stance is the only move left to them.

I always saw iAd not as a money-maker, but as Apple's thoughts on what advertising should be. That is, it was their way to try to make ads less tacky for their devices — especially noticeable in the initial million-dollar ad sales to high profile brands.

The messaging was all about how slick and polished and pretty they were, and how expensive.

Unfortunately Apple failed to realise banner ads are tacky no matter how much polish you throw at them.

I wouldn't necessarily say, they have suddenly realized this; they have been leading by example for user experience for awhile and are now just being more public about it.

Nobody that really understands the problem of no privacy between government or another collecting agency knows enough to weight it on purchasing their device or going with their OS for their phone, tablet, or laptop. If more people knew, how it could be for collecting every single thing from a user, i'm sure apple products would sell more, so I do agree with your point, that it is better to now advertise this.

This popular talking point conveniently ignores that ads not the only way companies can benefit form spying.

The HN crowd absolutely loves using "analytics" to try and divine ways to make their products more profitable. Microsoft even uses this as an excuse for Win10's "telemetry" spyware: they say it's to improve the product. Yet when Apple spies on its users, suddenly it's ok because Apple isn't an ad company.

Apple is using this topic to attack their customers, but they are not exactly on moral high ground.

Tracking crashes, interface pain points, etc. is, in itself, a perfectly legit thing for a developer to do. There's been all kinds of software, open-source and otherwise, that asks for permission to phone home with usage logs for roughly as long as there's been broad internet adoption. Win10 telemetry is hated mainly because they're so dishonest about it: you're encouraged to use default settings on installation, they're very secretive about what info is actually gathered and about what the settings do, and they straight-up lie about some of the things you can supposedly disable.

Neither Amazon nor Microsoft rely heavily on advertising income.

Neither does IBM, HP, Oracle, Cisco, Salesforce, etc.

In fact when it comes to "major US tech companies", either by revenue or by market cap, I can only think of Facebook and Google that make money mainly from advertising income.

Everybody you listed, excepting Amazon, make the majority of their revenue from the enterprise, not the consumer. B2B companies don't need to use privacy as a differentiator, and would gain no advantage by doing so; enterprises want "managed" software that enables them to spy on their employees.

Amazon, the consumer-focused exception, makes their money on physical products not produced by them, and on cloud services—both of which are mostly privacy-neutral as far as third parties go. Amazon knows what you tell Amazon (your shopping history; your AWS API calls) but their business model doesn't involve giving that information to anybody else. They could theoretically take a stance on privacy, but they aren't doing much to enable privacy; just coincidentally avoiding doing anything that negates it.

"Consumer-focused major US tech companies," then. Hell, the logic still applies even if it's only directed at Google, who Apple seems to consider its arch-nemesis.

(And while they may not be specifically selling ads, Amazon's business model is absolutely heavily invested in invasive ad tracking, which was my point. Witness how Amazon products that you look at but don't immediately buy follow you around the Web for fucking weeks.)