I'm sure they've been taught a lesson they'll never forget.
EDIT: as pointed out below, that was revenue not profit. But apple make so much damn profit it's not as crazy different as it would be for most companies. So it's more like 2.5 hours.
Classic mistake of conflating revenue with profit. They made closer to $25 billion.
Ignoring that, it's a mistake to think that these "small" amounts don't matter to companies. They just lost the yearly salaries of 150 or more engineers. It's worth it for them to assign 5 guys to add and maintain a feature that notifies customers of the performance drop.
How much money do you think they made from doing it though?
Or at least how much would they have made if no one had noticed and they didn’t have to do the $25 battery replacement program. I would guess A LOT more than this fine.
I mean, by the time your battery is in that state, you're well out of warranty. So they'd have to pay for the new batteries.
I do agree with your key point though, but from a different perspective - they'd probably make more money from people upgrading their phones to the newest model.
... the massive amount of bad PR this issue has garnered them over the past 3 years.
... the other fines in other geographies.
... the cost of the massive battery replacement program they put in place.
... the cost of software updates, legal, marketing, and managing this mess over the past few years
...etc etc.
This issue has dragged out for 3+ years and affected big parts of the company. Painting it like it was a drop in the bucket hiccough is just flat wrong.
Made $64 billion in the last 3 months.
So that's about 1 hour of profit.
I'm sure they've been taught a lesson they'll never forget.
EDIT: as pointed out below, that was revenue not profit. But apple make so much damn profit it's not as crazy different as it would be for most companies. So it's more like 2.5 hours.