Apple is not in biz of selling phone or laptop. They sell complete ecosystem. If you own an iPhone, airpod are magical, AirTag/iCloud makes sense. Why not also buy Macbook to tinker with own apps and an iPad when you need pencil/touch. And not just current, you also capture all future innovation, so you can charge for digital downloads. You can make new rules to charge for all digital transactions across all apps.
What you are suggesting is to allow 3rd party to join in the ecosystem.
If IBM had been smarter and launched PC as a closed platform it would have been a 10/100 trillion dollar enterprise.
> What you are suggesting is to allow 3rd party to join in the ecosystem.
Not necessarily. They could still continue to charge for every download, just as I can, and already do, listen to music on my iPhone without an Apple Music subscription and without purchasing from the iTunes store.
If I want the whole Apple experience, I will continue using macOS / IOS. Hell, that's the reason why I started buying MacBooks when I could afford them: the "apple experience".
But I also run Linux on my work PC, because for that I don't care about the Apple experience. But I hate my HP laptop, for comfort reasons. If I could buy a MacBook and have Linux run on it as well as it does on the hp, I would (because I love the hardware) and that would be a net gain for Apple, wouldn't it?
I get the whole point of the "experience" and "ecosystem", etc. Up until a few years ago I absolutely loved it. Still love my iphone and wouldn't switch to android.
But now I can't stand macOS anymore for my work needs. I'm looking to buy a new laptop to use Linux on it. The offers from Lenovo / HP / Dell don't look all that great to me. I would absolutely buy an MBP if I knew Linux worked perfectly on it, but I know it doesn't, so Apple doesn't get to make a sale.
The point is: If I want to tinker with an iPhone and would not buy one if I couldn't, why is it a loss for Apple to sell an extra phone, even if the buyer won't consume their other digital products? The seller wouldn't have consumed them anyway, especially without buying the iPhone.
Yes, there's the support side of things, but again, they could have some sort of warranty voiding system in place.
What you are suggesting is to allow 3rd party to join in the ecosystem.
If IBM had been smarter and launched PC as a closed platform it would have been a 10/100 trillion dollar enterprise.