Yes, and the most important part is .. you need a sufficiently high-margin business that you can scale up, otherwise you'll never be big enough to "control your

Yes, and the most important part is .. you need a sufficiently high-margin business that you can scale up, otherwise you'll never be big enough to "control your inputs". I mean sure, you can always work on decreasing risk (from directly hedging financially ... forward contracts, swaps, basically counterparty insurance), to keeping a shitton of inventory, using standardized components, etc.. But of course the accumulation of capital allowed Apple to do this, which is simply [quantity] x [unit economics]. Again "obviously", it's not independent of Steve's (and Apple's as a whole) philosophy. Repositioning themselves into a high-end market immediately helped with the unit economics, even if they sold last year's technology with a simplified (but polished!) UI/UX.