What I said is exactly correct. The way Apple handles this is unethical and definitely does not accurately represent their services category or the Apple TV+ service itself.
This is actually a very serious allegation. Do you have a source for it? Not only are you correct that it would be unethical, but it would actually be blatantly illegal for Apple to be doing this, and if it were even remotely true, it should certainly be resulting in an investigation by the SEC. This is called defrauding investors, and there are massive penalties for any publicly traded company that does this, and especially for one the size of Apple.
I've listened to Apple explain this at least twice on investor calls, and I've read specific information from business publications and financial analysts that talk specifically about the investment side of Apple (e.g. Barrons, CNBC, the Financial Times), and they've all made it very clear that Apple is not allocating revenue to its Apple TV+ from every single qualifying device sold, but only from those who actually signed up for the service.
This is all part of generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and not only is it done by every company that offers these kinds of services in order to make sure revenues are being reported as accurately as possible, but companies are actually required to move revenue around in this way in order to avoid fraudulent reporting in the other direction, such as when Apple had to adjust their numbers years ago to spread out the purchase of an iPod touch across several quarters in order to stop charging customers for software updates. In other words, Apple isn't actually allowed to give Apple TV+ away for free with the purchase of a new device either, since that would result in revenue from hardware sales being artificially inflated at the expense of services, which would be equally misleading to investors.
Ultimately at the end of the day, it does Apple very little good to artificially inflate its Apple TV+ revenue, since it doesn't report that separately. It's lumped in with Apple's $13.2 billion services category, which includes everything from the App Store to its search deal with Google, and compared to those, the revenue from Apple TV+ isn't all that significant — even if Apple sold 100m Apple devices last year and reported Apple TV revenue from every one of them, that would add an extra $1.5b to that category each quarter, with no indication that those numbers came from Apple TV+. However, I doubt very much Apple is willing to commit securities fraud just to shift 2% of its total revenue to falsely bolster its services category, especially when that money is otherwise getting reported as part of hardware sales anyway.
UPDATE: Here's an
good article from Barrons that illustrates how one analyst has actually been able to estimate how low the uptake has been on the free trial precisely because Apple is only re-allocating the revenue from those who actually sign up to take advantage of the free year.