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Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean? Why would operating a MVNO lower their market cap?
Apple has a 3 trillion market cap with a 1/100th of the products that Google makes. Why would they want to follow a strategy that is evidently worse? Lol.
(The rumored Apple self-driving car, if true, was also a silly idea. Aside from self-driving cars being an order of magnitude or two more difficult than popularly expected, building cars is not something Apple has any experience with, and is a capital-intensive business with little barrier to entry [besides capital]. Buffett noted that totaled since their beginning until now, car companies and airlines have, on net, lost money for their investors.)
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
Antitrust; antitrust; antitrust; but also, debt, debt, and more debt. Verizon? $115 billion of it. T-mobile? $78 billion. AT&T? $126 billion. It gets even better when 6G networks start knocking! So let's make the case to shareholders: We buy Verizon, with a $180 billion market cap, for a substantial premium; assume $115 billion of their debt; there's an investment into 6G on the horizon; this hopefully won't anger an…
why would they? It's already a fully integrated end-to-end communication device. They don't know how to operate it, they don't care about millions of people complaining about shitty network, they don't have to handle internationalization and they would position themselves against whoever carrier is before/after at&t, Verizon and T-Mobile. They make huge margins by making hardware. This type of margin is not happening…
I oversaw a big org that had like 50k iPhones. We would never come to agreement with Apple’s terms, and they’d never give us the price concessions.
Those 50k phones never cost more than $15,000 annually. I paid more for charging cables than iPhones. Apple can’t do that, as the feds have most favored nation status for procurement. Carrier also accept liability for the App Store, which Apple will flip the bird about.
Wireless carriers are a low-margin, increasingly commoditized business. Apple is only interested in expanding into high-margin businesses like services (iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV, etc.) where they can offer unique value (e.g. privacy) compared to their competitors. Apple keeps so much cash on hand because they have more money than worthwhile ways to invest it.
The commoditization is a myth - it’s like beer, most of the competition are brands that are either reskinned white label services or partners.
PATH 1: Privatized Carriers are the Forever Norm
In this scenario, private carriers (cellular, wireline, satellite, fiber, etc) don’t get nationalized or regulated (so now, but forever). The market forces there are all about consolidation since these are low-margin businesses, and fewer competitors means higher prices, more revenues, and more customers. If Apple entered this arena, they’d be exposing themselves to the predatory maneuvers of companies like BT or AT&T, who generally enjoy screwing their competitors over and locking customers in. Now these telecoms would have justification for blocking Apple devices or functionality (like some did to FaceTime), and deliberately choosing radios the iPhone doesn’t support so as to force Apple to spend more money on expansion of their network or adopting new radios for said networks. It generally exposes Apple to a world of pain and misery for nothing in terms of growth, and hinders their technological progress by forcing them to invest exponentially more money to support new standards or products across their network.
PATH 2: Carriers are Nationalized, with Telecom treated as a Utility
This is a more likely outcome given the importance of the internet to the functioning of a society. As a general rule, if your country NEEDS something in order to succeed, that thing is cheaper and more scalable if you own it yourself - provided you have a functioning government apparatus that invests in its modernization and maintenance (so, not America). In this case, Apple would’ve started their own carrier only to see control taken from them for the public good, wasting money they could’ve invested in other R&D or product lines. That’s likely the long game they foresaw back in the 2000s, and is likely why they never started their own MVNO or carrier.
Ultimately, Apple benefits more from building products on internationally standardized communications systems than building said systems themselves. It keeps their costs low, lets others absorb R&D and upkeep costs, while also driving the market and infrastructure adoption through new products themselves.
Infrastructure is rarely directly profitable to private enterprise, and when it is, it’s often taken away once it becomes necessary for the survival of a country.
If Apple bought a carrier, they'd need to sink insane capital into making it noticeably better (than others and itself before acquisition). And if they did, how noticeable is a little extra bandwidth? Not very considering everyone is offloading to wifi anyway.