Consider: Amazon has the majority of e-commerce sales today in the west. This is largely in part of decisions makes 20 years ago to allow honest reviews by real customers, both good and bad, earning strong customer trust. Now they're making money by selling the top spot on their search results and calling it "advertising". It's not. It's the sale of all that customer trust they spent 20 years building up. And the money they make on selling that trust is massive.
Consider: Apple is loved by its customers. They trust them. Apple means quality, security, and all the other good things they want. They're also at 30% of global mobile phone sales- massive market power.
Now it's time to start selling off that customer trust for profit.
Being Apple, the first move is to attack the entire online ad industry via privacy improvements- I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they did it, but I am suggesting they didn't do it for anything other than profit motive. Next, join the industry with a competitor in the space that takes advantage of all the things Apple knows about their customers. Trade the trust they've built up for a payout in cash.
It was either that or try to invent a new product. Since Steve Jobs died that hasn't gone very well.