Fair point. From the way I see it, Apple is not a traditional hardware company, persay. It’s not like buying a PC from Dell. Dell sells hardware, and just th

Fair point. From the way I see it, Apple is not a traditional hardware company, persay. It’s not like buying a PC from Dell. Dell sells hardware, and just that. The difference is Apple sells a user experience. Sure, you have to purcahase a physical thing to access that experience, but that is the nature of what you have purchased when you buy an iPhone. I think this boils down to a mismatched set of perspectives on the business Apple has created. Apple breaks the typical “buy hardware from X, install software from Y” flow and instead turned their iPhones into a portal into their own user experience universe. They did this because it provides a fundamentally unique experience when compared to other platforms. It’s a differentiating factor for them. Again, I would argue that Apple doesn’t want to be a hardware company. They want to be an experience company. In order to do that, they have to develop and sell cutting-edge hardware to you and me. Don’t get me wrong, not trying to say this is good or bad — just observing a sublety that I think gets missed when passionately arguing about hardware ownership and the rights that come with it.