If we look at other companies that have been in Apple’s position, this seems to be a temporary state of affairs even if it lasts for a while. If the expectation is for profit to grow year over year (it is), as growth of market share stalls because you’ve already expanded as much as you could, you’d get pressed to find profits by exploiting existing revenue streams. That’s the point when employee opposition stops working. Think of the recent events when the Google Search VP opposed the Ad VP’s requests to make search worse in order to improve ads revenue. The Ad VP got appointed to lead search and the previous search VP got moved to a dark corner somewhere. Once you run out of profit growth in the existing revenue streams, they’d ask you to find profit growth by reducing labor cost. We also saw that happening in various companies over the last little while.

If Apple was a private corporation owned by some people who aren’t looking for ever increasing profits, I’d believe they might not follow this pattern. But they aren’t.

That’s just my guess and the reasons behind it. Could turn out that you’re right and Apple is an exception to the rule. I mean, I hope it does but I’m not optimistic.