Doing the right thing is very often (if not almost always) the most profitable thing. It's very difficult to make a business out of serving your customers poorly; if you disagree, give it a shot, and let me know how it turns out for you.

Serving your customers well is good for profit, but it is not the same thing as doing the right thing. Ad-based companies have customers and users. By serving their customers too well they easily screw over the users, with obnoxious and even unethical ads.

I've got a set a special hex screws and soldered on RAM to talk to you about...

That seems like the classic mistake of believing that the larger market assigns importance to repairability. I haven't seen much evidence this is true.

It's not necessarily the most profitable thing. Apple is picking a fight with a very big adversary. This takes some serious backbone.

I promise you, even a protracted legal battle is far cheaper than significant global sales losses.