This reminds me acutely of Jobs' criticism of Apple during the the Sculley/Spindler years: that the company got incredibly greedy and extracted as much value from its customers as possible, without fully delivering on that value.
For hardware, an iPhone XR is only $30 more than a Galaxy S9, and though it's not quite an even comparison hardware-wise, that $30 difference buys you about 5 years of software updates, a suite of great creativity and productivity apps, servers that sync and back up, etc. (You can probably get some of that list from Google or Samsung, in exchange for your privacy.)
They could shrink their margins and have plenty, sure, but I'm not convinced that it's really such a bad deal for customers.
5 years of software updates? Can you post a source on that?