I don't think they are "checking"; they've carefully planned a path and are slowly and meticulously executing on it. They have no intention to stop at any point. Should the money stop flowing, they'll just come up with a new gadget. To make them backtrack on the walled garden would take an extinction-threatening event that (unfortunately) will never be on the cards as long as nobody can seriously threaten the iPhone.

I’m not so sure. A handful of high-profile opinions + a few hundred low-brow peeps like myself calling out bad behaviour can have a noticeable impact on sales in the mid-term.