Apple is making buttload of money on hardware because it does not sell any software anymore. I mean, in the mass consumer market – and they are cutting off the Pro software (which is sad). But remember the hardware sales pay for the software, too. So basically people say Apple is making $$$ on an iPhone price minus manufacturing costs and R&D but great slice of the zillion $$$ is the software part.
Anyway, not sure who said what exaclty, but Steve Jobs repeatedly said that Apple is great because of the tight interconnection between sw and hw. So Apple is not a hw company. It is not a sw company either. They do both and the result is greater than just a combination of the two.
I see Apple, and the way they present their products supports it, as an appliance company. It's harder and harder to repair their devices and the software is more and more integrated with the hardware – examples: force touch and feedback, Touch/Face ID, all the camera magic, Apple Pay, MBP Touch Bar etc. So basically the sw and hw are more and more inseparable unless you lose "half" the features.
Well, when someone makes an AI that would really be able to understand customer requirements and then implement them, that would put us out of our jobs! :-D