> The existence of Apple at all today is exactly because people perceive a value greater than the sum of the cost of parts.

yes and Apple loves that and that's why it makes its phones notoriously hard to repair or upgrade. that's why there are no SD card slots. that's why you have to buy an overpriced Apple exclusive lightning earphones or connector or whatever.

everyone is acting like the price of the phone must go up so much if it has higher storage, like there is no other engineering option.

I wasn't making a value judgement about whether or not this is a good thing. I was just pointing out that many people do find this a good thing. The product is more valuable than the price of the components to a large number of people. Whether or not that should be the case is better left to a different discussion. But the objective fact is that it's true for a huge number of people, and that provides an incentive for Apple to do more of the same.

If people were buying tens of billions of dollars worth of your product every three months, what would you do? Make it worse? Not find ways to make it more profitable?

I think you're incorrect about why Apple devices are not easy to repair and upgrade. But we may have to agree to disagree or have a different conversation about that.