Comment on Anon describes apple's practices
MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
Listen. Apple has a vested interest in you buying a new device. They “fix” your phone, it’ll be… What? Maybe $100? … They sell you a phone and it’s like 10x that.
Most people have so little fucks to give and so little free time to fuck around and find out, that they just shrug and go with it. Apple knows this. If they “can’t” (won’t) fix it, then it must not be able to be fixed anymore; the thoughts of a typical normie Apple user with more money than sense (or shits to give).
This is why Apple is a trillion dollar company. They treat their customers like ATMs. Just keep beating that horse until it stops making money.
If everyone simply replaced the batteries on their phones, not using Apple’s service (even when they’re willing to do the work), then they probably wouldn’t be worth a trillion dollars.
Since there’s enough NPCs out there giving them money to replace perfectly good devices with dead batteries, it will never change.
When you “trade in” your perfectly working phone for a new one, Apple suddenly absolutely can replace the battery, and they do, and then they sell your “unfixable” phone to the next schmuck, and make even more money.
I feel like this shit is so obvious that anyone who buys into the line “can’t be fixed” from Apple (or any other vendor), is insane, or mentally incapable of making rational decisions.
I fully accept that if I send my phone for service from the first party (in my case, Google), and they say it “can’t” be done, that’s not a hard no to fixing my stuff; that’s them refusing to serve me. I need to go somewhere else because I’ve been abandoned by the very people I put my trust into when I bought a device.
otacon239@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
Hardware margins are tiny. Most companies, including Apple, don’t make their money on hardware. They make almost all their money on ad revenue, data collection, and subscriptions.
Someone might get a new phone once every 1-2 years and make Apple ~$50-100 one time, if that, but they likely had to pay for an employee to sell it to you and for the store to be open for you to buy it.
Compare that to the nearly 100% profit on every digital service you pay for, such as Apple Music/TV.
I see it going one of three ways.
Not defending Apple or anything, but hardware is often the last place a modern tech company makes a profit.
seeaya@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Apple’s actually somewhat of an exception here. They actually make most of their profit from hardware, not services. In the first half of this year, Apple has made $167 billion in product sales, and $53 billion in services sales. Their cost of sales for products was $103 billion for products, and $13 billion for services. That gives $64 billion in profit from products and $40 billion in profit from services. So about 62% of Apple’s profit comes from product sales.
Teardown reports of iPhones indicate that an iPhone 15 costs $423 to make but costs $799, giving a profit margin of about 47%. This doesn’t account for shipping though, so the actual margin will be a bit lower.
Apple profits source Teardown source
otacon239@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
I stand corrected. You learn something new every day.
blarghly@lemmy.world 22 hours ago
Good assessment.
Apple, in large part, is a luxury brand. Their biggest and most important advertisement is their users - people who want and can afford a glamorous, high end lifestyle, and their acolytes. So these are the people Apple caters to. If your phone is more than a year or two out of date, you are no longer a customer who functions to represent the luxury Apple brand - you are just a follower, who contributes insignificantly to the company’s revenue stream. So keeping parts on hand to repair your phone, and employees trained to do the repair, is money down the drain.