Well, if they really own the phone, you had better make a strong argument on why I should pay for it. If users were renting the phone for less than it cost to

Well, if they really own the phone, you had better make a strong argument on why I should pay for it. If users were renting the phone for less than it cost to make, I guess you could have an argument about the device just being a necessary tool to access a service, including the app store (just like the alm-in-one modem/routers of telcos in EU). But that is hardly the case, users pay for iPhones, and quite a lot of money at that, in fact much more in average than buyers of other brands. So now you REALLY need to explain how they can sell the phone for such a large amount of money and still retain ownership because the way I see it one of these statements cannot be right or it would be both illegal and something users really wouldn't agree to if it were presented like that to them. The reality is that Apple is abusing its power over a device they already transferred ownership to someone else, because they already got money for it. Any other arguments are a mischaracterization of the situation and the only reason Apple got away with so much control so far is because we collectively (as a society) didn't completely understand what it meant. But now we are trying to fix and bad faith argument like yours do not help at all...