The depressing bit is that they can make a rational decision to weigh that cost against the amount of money it takes to keep people happy (vs doing nothing). Not that I support it, but they might be following the financially superior option. There's a lot of incentive to get that answer "correct", so I suspect it's currently working out in their favour, even though it sucks for those of us caught on the shitty side of that equation.

While true that economies in their various forms can form unsympathetic relationships between producers and consumers, it seems that, broadly speaking, producers who align more strongly with consumer satisfaction tend to ‘win’ and those who broadly speaking don’t tend to ‘lose’ on a long-term basis.

To their credit, Apple seems to get this mostly right.