... and the alternative is? Apple management answers to shareholders and "service income" is the only thing in Apple earnings that hasn't been going down for years.
Apple does something shitty, they had to because they owe it to the shareholders. The shareholders are protected by the fiduciary protection allotted to their gamble so the company is in no way responsible for having an ethical or socially beneficial business model.
Corporate interests have us all by the balls.
Being forced to open up by both the EU and homefront is more than enough a mandate for Tim and the rest of the leadership to make the transition without any trouble from shareholders.
They can use this to really open up the platform and solidify their marketshare.
Now instead you have every major player that doesn't already have its own distribution (Meta, AMZN, NFLX) looking for the exists.
As a side note, this is why I think Zuckerberg burning tens of billions in AR/VR R&D was such a good move. It gave them a foothold in the next thing.
I'll be surprised if the rest of MANGA wont follow suit and double down after what Apple is doing.
Which is strange, because there's lots of governments in Brussels, and for example the Belgian Federal government doesn't. Belgian Federal employees totally overwhelm local restaurants, and this is Brussels, right, it's perhaps not London, but whatever weird thing you like eating, brussels has 10 choices in the city center. Lebanese, Chinese, 3 generations Italian, Moroccan, Algerian, and of course Belgian fries, whatever you want, square after square full of restaurants ... But at lunch, impossible to get anything around the north or central station. Or NATO people, while they have a very deserved reputation for paranoia don't hate Brussels. (Consultants are driven around on the NATO compound, phones disabled, for minimum 20 minutes, in a bus with no windows, so you never know what is in which building, and that is if you're coming over to help in one of their data centers. If it's actually classified, like a radar system ... it's not fun) EU commissars, even 2nd and 3rd level are constantly protected by large security forces (~10 people constantly surrounding them, even inside EU commission buildings, they regularly clear the entire area around the Berlaymont building to take those "see, we're approachable" interviews outside they love doing, but really they're about as approachable as a US FT100 CEO), despite that even Jens Stoltenberg mostly only has a driver. The EU is totally isolated from everything. It's a huge government, but located on a relatively small area (the "European quarter"), where you won't find many restaurants, or culture, even the metro station is pretty far away from Berlaymont. EU employees eat inside EU buildings, they live outside of Brussels, they never have meetings outside of EU buildings ...
https://www.reuters.com/technology/apple-overtakes-samsung-t...
Samsung raw unit sales of smartphones have been decreasing since ... what like 2015 or something? So simply by keeping sales equal, Apple could overtake Samsung in sales. But that wouldn't necessarily indicate an increase in profit.
It's definitely true that services is Apple's biggest income growth right now. And the revenue is already double that of all Macs