There's a difference between a middleman that simply ensures that you're paid for your work on a fixed commission-based model, and a middleman who basically controls the entire platform you use to reach your audience. A better analogy would be OnlyFans vs a pimp.
no, but companies like Dyson that promote conspicuous consumption do very well in the US where they might not otherwise because of those cultural differences.
Sales are accounted for in $ terms, not units sold. It's the same thing with Hollywood. You might think movies are more popular than ever thanks to record breaking sales (pre-COVID at least). In reality, we reached peak movie, in terms of tickets sold, in 2002! [1]
Back to iPhones, this [2] page shows their stats by units sold (about half way down). iPhone is essentially treading water if those data are correct (with a peak in 2015 overcome twice since, but by ~1% each time), but I strongly suspect that that's showing units shipped and not units sold, as iPhone sales declining has been universally reported.
Ask yourself the question of what it means when a company makes more dollars from a product while not increasing the number of units sold. It's completely obvious if you think about it for a moment.
I doubt the change was relevant. I would expect if they can reasonably make a change even if not totally ideal, the work as first submitted can be evaluated on it’s own as it is shown to be original work.
Changes were often designed to be impossible to perform if your architecture was not flexible, or to show your algorithms had poor time or space behavior. So, changes were designed both to test you were the author and to fail poorly designed projects.
I mean, Jeep and Dodge (when owned under their American umbrella corp., FCA) were later found to be using similar defeat devices (see "Other manufacturers [0]). Though if you want to smear them, you may as well go all in and point out they were the original Nazi car brand - not even Tesla has that kind of credibility
