Easy counter-argument: If Apple is placing the customer first, why not sell the product at half the price (thus only 5% profit margin), wouldn't that make more customers even more happier?
Branching out to different fields )i.e. iPod) than your current bread-and-butter is not ignoring profits, it is being smart and realizing there are opportunities in other markets.
Interestingly, Apple is placing the customer first by charging what they do.
Why? Because you couldn't do what Apple does with a 5% profit margin. They can ignore Wall Street, creditors (which they don't have), sharks, hostile investors (Carl Icahn etc), and so on all because they generate a healthy profit.
Who thinks it would be a good situation for Apple to be begging at Bill Gates' (ala 1997; whomever it might be) knees in the future if something goes wrong with an iPhone launch? I'm betting their customers don't think it would be good.
If Apple's customers love their products, it's in the interest of those customers to keep funding Apple's ability to keep doing what it does. What Apple does costs a lot of money. One slip at their scale could easily cost $10 billion. A 5% margin would not cover that.
If their next data center costs $5 billion in cash to build due to ever increasing scale and complexity, and they had had 5% margins all this time, it might be a stretch to pull it off (maybe with debt). If the global complexities of navigating a world wide mobile product increase to ever bigger scale, that 5% margin wouldn't cut it. I couldn't imagine trying to manage the iPhone at 100 million in sales, on a 5% margin. They're not selling jelly beans.
How about if Foxconn keeps having to raise wages by 15% to 25% per year for the next ten years. Again, 5% margins would not cut it. Or if that did happen, and Apple then finds it more cost effective to build completely automated robotic assembly systems, but it costs $20 billion to R&D and construct that... and so on and so forth.
I wouldn't want to have to ask them to do so, I'd seek out a bank that operates soundly. It's the difference between Wells Fargo (forced at gun point to take the TARP money), and insolvent vile blackholes like Citi and Bank of America.
I would rather my bank charge a profitable, common / historically normal interest rate, than go to the Federal Government (aka tax payers) seeking a bailout at a later date or collapsing into insolvency.
For example, by keeping interest rates at 0% for so long, and driving 30 year mortgage rates down below 4%, the Federal Government is going to burden US tax payers for decades to come with hyper expensive (to the tax payer), money losing mortgages. No sane business would lend money at 4% for 30 years on something like a house after the disaster we've just been through and what's still occurring.
Fannie & Freddie are going to keep costing tax payers tens of billions for many years to come as the Feds intentionally under price the market on mortgages. I don't think that's in any way sane or fair to tax payers.
Well, last I checked Samsung, HTC, Motorola, HP, Dell, Asus didn't receive bailouts. We are talking about tech companies here - arguing that Apple does not care about profit is naive at best, as shown by my original argument.
They could easily stay independent by other means. They care about their profit more, so that's why they don't lower their margins. As a public company, they don't have much leeway here - what do you think would happen when they come out saying at the next shareholder meeting "our customers are most important to us - half price on everything from now on!"
Who's arguing that Apple does not care about profits?
I've argued the exact opposite across numerous posts. They care about profits and it's in the best interests of their customers that they do. Which is exactly what I said in the parent.
I'd argue that the best interest of the Apple customer is maximum value, not cheapest price. And that's exactly why their customers continue to buy like crazy at a high price point. IE what's best for the customer and what's best for Apple are not mutually exclusive, but rather they're fully integrated. Apple's customers would not be served by an Apple with 5% margins.
Branching out to different fields )i.e. iPod) than your current bread-and-butter is not ignoring profits, it is being smart and realizing there are opportunities in other markets.