Yep, developers are a tiny tiny tiny minuscule percentage of Apple's revenue.
Apple's move towards services makes perfect sense. Apple now has a grip from the silicon to the end service. The entire stack. That's with the new move towards service starting in 2016 with Apple Music. That's a way to grow for a giant behemoth that Apple is.
I don't understand HN sometimes. We live in a tiny bubble and complain without understanding business, market and investor perspectives.
I would love to have something that competes with YouTube TV but respects privacy and doesn't funnel even more data to Google. The other live TV services all have absurdly arbitrary DVR limits.
Not that Apple's streaming service will compete with YouTube TV, but I wish it would. Also, YouTube TV doesn't work all that great on Apple TV and I'd hope Apple could get that right too.
The DVR is critical. And hardware DVRs I've used are horrible. Maybe I haven't tried the right one, but the ones I've tried are less than worthless and I've finally given up on them. I also despise the network specific apps for my devices. Some are great, but most are garbage and constantly require me to authenticate over and over again.
Be careful, just because you don't want this doesn't mean no one wants it. The HN crowd isn't Apple's target demographic with this stuff.