[xp84]

“Paid for the development”

This comes off as incredibly bought-in to Apple PR, and if you’re not on their payroll, I don’t understand why you’re carrying water for them so aggressively.

First of all, the incredibly high margin hardware more than “pays for” the development of all the parts that make that hardware useful including iOS. We all know this.

Apple makes a tremendous amount of profit, both gross and net. This will dent their top line and their bottom line a bit. It will not make the iPhone a money-losing platform. “Not making as much pure profit as your near-monopoly status might theoretically allow you to if there were no antitrust laws” does not imply “that money will have to be made up somewhere.” They may end up being only “wildly, amazingly profitable” instead of “wildly, absurdly, amazingly profitable.” They don’t “have to” make up any particular amount of money.

Whether that upsets their shareholders including their mega billionaire CEO, is just the breaks. It is quite fitting for a group of people who enjoyed all those amazing profits from Apple’s monopolistic behavior so far — money that I might point out, isn’t even being required to be paid back.