There is no way they’re making that much per phone on adding ads.

YouTube’s who platform is built to show ads and run by an ad company. They are likely going to be much more profitable than a few ads in the App Store and Maps, and I’ve read Premium users are more profitable than ad-supported users. They are charging $160/year after a recent price increase. The fee you’re suggesting would be over 14 years worth of payments.

Amazon lets users remove ads on Kindle for a 1 time fee of $20, and people keep Kindles a long time.

The goodwill alone would be worth more than $20, considering iPhones already have margin (unlike most Amazon hardware).

Apple has been using security as the tent pole feature to try and differentiate themselves from everyone else. One of the reasons all the other platforms feel insecure is that ads imply data collection. If they really want to “think different” they need to stop following the crowd and operate a system that doesn’t create the compromised incentives that ads tend to come with.

They'd have to have an iron will to not do what every other leading platform has done, which is to:

- Gradually "make the line go up" by ramping up ad volume until the product is terrible (thereby ruining Apple's reputation among the 50-90% of users who aren't paying the ad-free prices).

- Periodically nerfing the premium ad-free tiers and putting ads into tiers that were previously ad-free.

- Purposefully making the lower tiers worse and worse in order to squeeze out marginal increases in conversion rates to the premium tiers.