A huge ecosystem of third party accessories, cases, skins, etc.
The openness is easily worth it.
The openness is easily worth it.
As others have mentioned, these are more useful for when they don't, i.e. before the actual release.
With iPhone 4 Gizmodo literally acquired the prototype and still large portion of the crowd did not believe them, because the design seemed radically different to what they expected.
Nowadays with the size of the supply line there seem to remain no more hardware secrets before the keynotes.
So either you made your own measurements or if you were doing Made For iPhone and they would give it to you as part of that program which surely you must have to pay for.
You might want to pay for the Made For iPhone certification for some things, but I doubt most cases have it.
(but I could be wrong; NDAs w/China? no idea what the time between announced/released/shipped is typically; I last bought Apple product in 2009...)