I think he's suggesting that there are two kinds of profit. The short-term, next-quarter-results kind which fuel wall street, and the longer play when money is invested now and achieves a payback later.
Unfortunate when the word "profit" appears in text, it is often unclear which one is being referred to.
The easiest way to maximize short-term profit is to simply fire all r&d staff. Reduce expendses, sell exiting products and profits for that quarter will go up by plenty. That'll work for 2 quarters, maybe even a year, before the whole thing implodes.
Obviously we don't do that - we forgoe some of the immediate profit to gain profit in the future. But there's no guarantee that what r&d are working on will ever pay off. There's risk involved.
There are also solid reasons for doing one product, which will never make profit, in order to complement another product which will. That complement might be direct, or indirect.
Taking Tim's example of making sure apple devices can be used by blind people, that may indeed be profitable if one considers both the blind people who buy your product, and also the people who _know_ blind people who made their decision based on your blind-friendliness. This is of course impossible to measure.
And therein lies the root problem when it comes to "only doing things to maximize profits". It's mpossible to measure the actual profitability, over both short and long term profits, of pretty much anything we do. There are slimply too many unknowns.
Had Tim answered the question another way, would that impact profitability? If the question had not been asked, would that improve profitability? Given that the question was asked, and answered the way it was, does Apple gain some goodwill? Does that mean that by soundly rejecting the question it accomplished what the question asked for?
Profit is impossible to optimize for. To make profit you encounter risk. And by definition some risky actions will ultimately be unprofitable. Thus the line about companies responsibility being just to make profits, and the promise the Question asked for, is not meaningful in any practical way.
John Kenneth Galbraith wrote with a great deal of detail and eloquence about what kind of conditions might inspire corporations not to maximize profit, and how those kinds of decisions actually contribute to the perpetuation and success of said corporations. The main book to read is The New Industrial State. He wrote it in the '60s when conditions were very different, but the fundamental principles remain valid.
As a Apple's commitment to accessibility makes automated testing much easier, believe it or not. I'm not sure if they started out with this intention, but I'd find it hard to believe that Apple hasn't noticed this and this reasoning has been a part of why they're so adamant about it.
