1. I dont think you understand Apple's business and supply chain really well, due to theirs sheer scale, they do count pennies.
2. There are roughly 1.5 billion devices with Lighting Port, if only 10% of its user buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150M per year. Not to mention they ship 250M lightning cables inside new devices every year that could be used to mask their BOM and margin. From Apple's perspective, that is a 400M profits per year business.
Counting pennies means saving money. It does not mean driving revenue through low-cost licensing sales.
I think your point is that Apple has such significant scale that just charging a few bucks a year to a fraction of their users means that they make what you or I would consider to be significant revenue.
> if only 10% of its users buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150m a year
My points, summarised:
1. As someone who is extremely familiar with Apple's business, MFI looks like it's as much about minimising costs and preserving CSAT than driving revenue.
2. We can at least infer that even if the ludicrous (sorry) assumptions you've made are true, we're talking about a business line which contributes less than 1% to Apple's bottom line. The total revenue generated by MFI is likely to be far, far less than that: I imagine in the order of $80m USD a year, on a company which -- again -- does $250 BILLION a year of revenue.
The crux of my argument is: Apple does not care sufficiently about selling you cables and dongles to derange engineering decisions on their products. Nobody at Apple is saying "let's not switch to USB-C because we can keep making money from MFI and lightning dongles."
People constantly make this bullshit claim that Apple makes engineering decisions so that they can sell you a dongle or a cable, and it's so patently illogical that nobody should feel happy repeating it.
>The total revenue generated by MFI is likely to be far, far less than that
Since you are talking about "revenue" and not profits, I can assure you the world sells more than 80M MFi lightning cable per year.
There are absolute number, hundreds of millions, or there are relative numbers. 1%. Just to make a point, AMD only earn a Net Income or 300M this year.
The same argument could have made for Apple to provide more iCloud Storage for Free, Which they wont.
2. There are roughly 1.5 billion devices with Lighting Port, if only 10% of its user buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150M per year. Not to mention they ship 250M lightning cables inside new devices every year that could be used to mask their BOM and margin. From Apple's perspective, that is a 400M profits per year business.