They do make a profit on the hardware when they sell it to you. But that's a one time profit. The new buzzword of capitalism is "recurring income". And that is

They do make a profit on the hardware when they sell it to you. But that's a one time profit. The new buzzword of capitalism is "recurring income". And that is where Apple's software ecosystem comes into the picture. Apple today makes billions of dollars from its App stores, paid iCloud services, search bundling etc. These are profitable income they continue to earn for the whole life-cycle of the device. And this is why Apple wants a stranglehold on both its hardware and software. And precisely why it will sabotage any other viable OS that emerges on its platform (which it can now do much more easily with its ARM SoCs). For apple fans who crib about how Linux / xBSD OS sucks because of all the configurations / "extra steps" they require to do something, I'll wager that running a Hackintosh on an Intel / AMD processor will be a less buggy experience than running Linux / xBSD on the Mac M1 as a Desktop OS. (Simply because AMD and Intel are actually happy to see macOS running on their CPUs, unlike Apple that sees other OSes on its ARM cpus as a threat.)