Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think "most people" have been shifting towards longer than 24-month replacement cycles. Leasing with a fixed end is probably predicted in their financial models to do a better job of getting more people onto a strict 24 month cycle. Nobody will want to actually buy out their lease on a 2-year-old phone, so they'll turn it in and lease another one, so Apple can throw it into the shredder[1] and show an additional sa…
They won't throw it into the shredder. They'll capture the residual by wholesaling it second-hand, same as with trade-in's.
Think of it from Apple's perspective: You sell a phone for $1,100 and get a 37%[1] margin on it, so that's a $407 profit margin, and a $693 cost to make it.
That phone gets Apple $768 in lease payments according to their site.
Then they take the phone back from the user at 2 years old. EBay shows 2-year-old iPhone 15 Pros going for about $400 so let's assume the wholesale prices is $300.
So Apple has the old phone and can sell it for $300 pure profit before tax or $237 after 21% federal tax, but they know that its existence will displace a new iPhone sale somewhere. Or they can declare it as "too damaged to resell" and shred it, probably take a tax deduction (for the official residual of $332? I'm not sure) for that loss, offsetting $70 of taxes elsewhere, and (very very important point here) because they know they'll sell one incremental new phone, they can expect to have an additional $1100 of topline revenue to show, and another $407 gross profit that they get to book.
Sell it: $237 - $70 opportunity cost of tax deduction they don't get = +$167 to gross profit, Shred it: +$1100 topline, +$407 in gross profit, +$70 in EBITDA.
I'm not a real accountant so I'm sure a few of these figures are off, but I think my main point is valid: Since Apple's main motivation is to increase their stock price, they may benefit more from shrinking the aftermarket than they would from harvesting the value of the old iPhone.
This logic does depend on an additional working semi-late-model iPhone finding its way into the hand of a person, or there being a chain of people, at the end of which having someone who won't buy a brand new iPhone this year, but I think it's hard to argue it doesn't.
[1] https://axis-intelligence.com/apple-statistics/
[2] https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-iphone/iphone-17-pro?purchase...