> But when your iDevice breaks, you don’t necessarily go to Apple to fix it.
Now you're making the case for not buying the insurance because you have a way of paying less for the repairs out of pocket which makes the insurance less valuable.
> It’s possible that AppleCare is a win for both Apple (customer retention) and the customer (lower cost to stay within favorite ecosystem) because it is NOT a zero sum game between them - there are many other players in the game.
The theory being that if you pay out of pocket to Apple they have a $100 margin, but if you pay out of pocket to an independent repair shop they have a $10 margin, and Apple would profit from selling you the insurance by transferring that $10 profit from the independent repair shop to themselves.
By this logic they should also have lowered the price of their repair service to be price competitive with the independent one because then they would get more repair business and attract customers to their ecosystem by having lower repair costs. But they evidently prefer to have higher margins.
And claiming the independent repair shop's margins, evidently only in the case of the insurance and not for actual out of pocket repairs for unknown reasons, would only be possible if the independent shop's margins are larger than the cost of the moral hazard and all other administrative overhead of offering the insurance. But their margins are very slim.
