I mean if you want to dig into it, Apple is a company that makes most of its from money from selling tech. They spend a lot on highly effective advertising, but they pay actual advertising companies to do that. So I don’t think that qualifies them as an advertising company unless you’re just trying to be dismissive. You make your money from making and selling tech, you’re a tech company first.

Google and Meta make the vast majority of their money by selling ads and selling user data to other advertising companies so they can create their own targeted ads. That by definition makes them ads companies more than tech companies.

Microsoft sells mostly software/services to enterprise clients, they’re a B2B software company. Amazon too with AWS, etc. I read the other day that with how big NYT’s word games have gotten they’re more of a gaming company that also sells newspapers these days.

Anyway, yeah you can call Apple an advertising company or a fashion company or whatever but the fact is they’re more of a tech company than most of the other companies you probably think of as tech companies. Apple-produced tech is regularly compared to the likes of Nvidia, Intel, and AMD. You can’t say the same for the other top “tech” companies.