Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure. If you naively assume that lost sales/revenue is just for the iPhone device itself. But every lost sale of an iPhone is also one less person within the ecosystem. An ecosystem that plays off each of its elements to drive revenue e.g. iPhone user buys movies which they can only watch if they buy an AppleTV etc. It's borderline impossible to quantify all of the indirect revenue Apple would lose not just now but i…
How is it borderline impossible? There's a technique pretty much every company that knows what's it doing applies to figure out exactly what you mentioned and it's called downstream impact analysis. I'm absolutely 100% certain if you're an executive at Apple and you ask your finance department what the downstream impact is of an iPhone sale the finance department will come back with numbers for the profit variance wh…
And I fully agree that the finance department would be able to calculate the expected profit per customer for today's products. But what about tomorrow's ? And the next year ?
Apple locks in the user at multiple points: apps, movies, TV shows, books, accessories etc.