If it costs them $1.25, and everyone else can do it for $0.75 because they have scale and capital... that doesn't seem long-term stable.
If one cloud provider becomes dominant, Apple loses. If Apple loses market share, they lose negotiation power, and Apple loses.
The only way Apple wins is if cloud stays a multi-polar race AND Apple stays cloud-portable AND Apple retains significant market share AND cloud stays commoditized.
I'm not saying it's a bad bet (I'm sure Wall Street loves the resulting financials), but it does seem like a dangerous long term strategy, if cloud becomes more of product.
Apple has been basically funding Azure Expansion. Microsoft needed Apple to scale their Cloud business in a multi-year contract. And Apple using Microsoft to drive AWS price down. I think for one reason or another ( politics, strategic, or technical ) they have avoided GCP. Apple also partner with other Cloud Services Provider in different Region. And they are doing exactly what you described as Multi Cloud. Even their CDN are split between Akamai, ( used to be Limestone and they switch to something else I cant remember ) and their own.
I would not be surprised if their next move is to fund Cloudflare R2 Storage services. ( Once it becomes mature enough )
More than Enough. When you have 1 Billion iPhone customer who are also in the highest paying basket. The purchasing power is likely over 50% of the total market. As similarly shown in App Store market.
The problem is Apple has always had an Asset Light strategy. Keeping many Datacenter of Storage running just isn't their thing. That is why they are still relying on Azure, AWS for iCloud Storage.
>And if not, then they're still stealing iDevice margin to price cloud competitively.
Currently the iCloud Services ( or in fact all Services Revenue ) are masked by App Store profit and Google's Search Engine Deal. i.e most of their other Services like Apple Music, iCloud, News+ are low margin business but are used to dilute down their extremely high margin profits from App Store and Search Engine.