Is Apple selling these cables at cost, or are they making a profit from them? Amazon isn't a brand I trust either, but from the magnitude of that difference I'm pretty sure Apple is making a tidy profit on these cables. I don't think Apple is a trillion dollar company because of cable sales, but from where I sit it sure seems like Apple is a company that loves nickel and diming people even though they don't need to.
Well that's the contention isn't it? Whether that tax is present, and whether the mechanical build quality justifies it.
Assume for every phone or iPad they sell, they average one extra cable (for work, for the car, because it breaks, whatever..)
Apple charges $19 for an extra cable. Assume it costs them $2 to make the cable (and it probably costs much less).
That's 43.5 billion right there. Which even for Apple is not small potatoes. Especially because cables are probably their highest margin product.
Apple's filings show that less than one half of one percent of their revenue comes from the entirety of the MFi program, which includes not just the first-party cables they make, but every single licensed iPhone-compatible accessory of any kind anywhere in the world.
It seems silly to me to think that Apple would jeopardise the value of the number one consumer electronics product on the planet, the product that produces 60% of their revenue, by nickel-and-diming customers on cables.
https://www.extremetech.com/electronics/136947-apples-mega-c...
And the video dongles do transcoding, IIRC. https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...
Apple makes money because they sell metric shitloads of $1200 phones and $600 watches and, increasingly, software and services for them. Not cables.