People are rather getting themselves tied up in knots about this. Some are arguing that Apple, like all companies, exists first and foremost to make money. This seems like a seductive argument but it's predicated on a very shaky foundation in logic.
Take it form another perspective: I'm a human being. At the most basic level, I am just a load of cells that make organs and this makes a living creature the sole purpose of which, the absolute sole driving force of this entire thing that makes up me, is to be a conveyor of genetic material. Everything else is just to make that happen - that is, of course, if we choose to look at a human being in an entirely reductionist sense. Break it down to the basics and you seem to find a fairly soulless driving force. Necessity and that's all. Even that's basically necessity from a very limited perspective. In the big scheme of things, life is just another phase shift of energy.
The same thing happens when you try to look at companies in an absolutely reductionist way. In fact, if you remove the 'money' aspect and just put in place 'that which it makes', you have something that describes everything. Schools are just factories for churning out exam results. Hospitals? Just garages that fix humans rather than cars.
But we all know that this doesn't really describe life. The little lumps of matter that make up what we are may all just be lumps but that doesn't help you understand the whole - the world is a smorgasbord of complex relationships from which we gain emergent properties like meaning, purpose, emotion, love, joy and logic! You can't understand these things by cutting the world up into infinitely smaller pieces until it all looks the same.
Some may think they're being all 'realpolitik' by applying a mindlessly reductionist approach to analysing how entities work but all that leads to is nihilistic ignorance. Nothing means anything. We're all just atoms arranged in different ways, meaningless and without purpose. Who knows, maybe that's true - but it's hardly helpful. It doesn't give us anything we can use in reality. It's just a way for some people to feel smugly superior to the 'gullible fanbois!" and the "sheeple" who get drawn in by all this "BS". Which is fine - feel that way if it makes you happy. But, ask yourself, does it really make you happy?
