Historically mobile phone hardware is a loss leader for the platform products that they afford access to. Just look at cell service providers giving them away for free, or at Amazon Fire Phone.

> Just look at cell service providers giving them away for free

In North America which is in a different universe in this regard compared to the rest of the world. Where I'm from, carriers sell SIM cards and that's it. Postpaid plans aren't a thing. You buy your phone separately in an electronics store, for full price. This applies to iPhones as well.

You ignored Amazon fire phone.

Another example would be gaming consoles. The console makers definitely take a cut of all the games that are released on their platform

There is a difference with games consoles, in that games do not compete with each other in the same way. Someone might buy Zelda by Nintendo, but also buy a third party RPG. Very few people will pay for Apple Music and Spotify at the same time.

I also see many people saying that they won't install WhatsApp, and will only use iMessage.

As long as Apple competes directly with its own customers the platform will be unfair.

> You ignored Amazon fire phone.

Yes, because I have no idea why it is so apparently special. I do know that they sell kindles so cheaply because they hope people would be buying books from them.

> Another example would be gaming consoles.

Except those are never marketed as general-purpose pocket computer devices like iPhones are. They are appliances. Getting your hands onto an SDK for a gaming console requires being a company, signing an NDA, and probably committing to lots of other conditions.

Why should the Amazon Fire Phone be looked at as an example for anything? It was a colossal failure by every major except for the amount of e waste it generated.

> That certainly covers all the R&D that went into them.

Ref?

On the contrary, it's likely that getting rid of the Apple Tax would mean needing to significantly reduce development and maintenance of the software.

Think also of how the incentives work: If Apple is paid only when people buy a new phone, that adds pressure to shorten the lifespan of the software on the phone. If Apple is paid on an ongoing basis as the phone is used, this pressure is reduced, leading to longer-life phones.

iOS is already feature-complete and has been for quite some time. No one would be especially sad if it stopped updating except for security patches, new hardware features, and bug fixes.

I would be sad. Passkeys, built-in OCR, "Sign in with Apple", offline Siri are all from the past three years.

But also.. over the past several years I've grown to regard all new features as "god, _of course_ computers should be able to do that". So from my point of view iOS is neither "feature-complete" nor even "good enough". I'm annoyed that the future is coming much more slowly than it should, but I'm still thankful to Apple that it's coming.

One tiny example: "Lift object from background" seems like a gimmick, but in my head it's more like a completely natural feature that we just didn't have for whatever reason. For me, images are very naturally composed of _things_. All those standalone features like "face recognition", "dog breed recognition", "plant recognition", "lift object from background", "search by location" should just be one feature: the phone should see photos as collections of things in space, and it should know what those things are, because I know what those things are. Eh. One day we'll get there.

Proof is in the pudding. They have like a 40% profit margin. They are not just keeping pace with the cost of innovation. They are charging the absolute maximum the market will allow and squeezing suppliers for every nickel because no one can stop them.

Yeah: it isn't like Apple is spending their money on R&D or operations and they just have some extremely elaborate and overly expensive way of providing value to the customer that someone might value... they are literally just hoarding a ridiculous and almost embarrassingly large amount of cash. They have a money-printer that is being defended with anti-competitive lock-in mechanisms.

https://www.investors.com/etfs-and-funds/sectors/sp500-compa...

> Apple alone last week reported sitting on $202.5 billion in cash and investments. That's 7.4% of all the S&P 500's cash. And it's up nearly 4% from 2021.

I'd like Apple to have more money than just covering the R&D, because I believe they can do unrelated cool things with it (VR, Mac improvements, Apple Car, whatever).