I take it you’ve never purchased an Apple refurbished product? They’re in excellent condition. They do not look like 2-year used and abused trade ins. If trade-ins are going back to the refurb inventory (which I don’t know if they do) then it’s only after extensive actual refurbishment and new parts.

They’re not putting it back into a box, listing it for sale, and pocketing the difference.

They have the ability to tear the whole thing down to guts and screws. They absolutely do replace the case, glass and battery and sell as refurbished. They already do complete case swaps on their Macs.

It's still obviously making them money. How much, who's to say, likely highly variable depending on the condition of the phone. But if it didn't make them money they wouldn't do it, they're not a charity.

I'd imagine even a phone they can't fix to sell still has some value, even as scrap to them especially as the costs of every damn material that goes into any electronic device continue to soar.

And that all being said: two things can be simultaneously true at once. Leasing is a perfectly valid form of... well you can't really say ownership, acquiring goods I guess? And it also does mean Apple can now turn what may have been one-shot purchases into people who are just fine paying a monthly payment ad infinitum. And that, in turn, opens the door for keeping people on a perpetual new-phone treadmill of monthly payments that involve them never actually owning anything.

You can very easily tie this into the Samuel Vimes Boots Theory of Economics:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.