Apple is always "the hot girl in the relationship". They are giving you the opportunity to be a supplier to apple, with massive volume, and they expect cut-throat pricing, a high level of QC (no chinese factory fuck-fuck games with "impromptu cost reduction"), and absolute supply-chain reliability. It is just like Walmart and Costco, they are big enough that they can dictate the terms of the relationship, and they do so aggressively. And just like walmart, in the long term this can mean that you have a single monopsony buyer who dominates your business and can ratchet you down even more over time.

goldman didn't realize what they were getting into here, they figured they could put one over on Tim Apple and no, the fruit company always comes out on top.

on top of that, apple really also kinda has a track record of using their market power to go to bat for consumers (app review/permissioning being one example, also user-privacy on MDM'd apple devices in the quasi-workplace being a focus, etc). And in this case they set up a bunch of terms that tend to reduce the fee stream that CC providers normally extract, pay the rewards daily, etc. Apple undoubtedly knew exactly what they were negotiating for etc, and goldman didn't realize how much those things were going to cost them (in lost fees).

So yeah, goldman thought they were the big man on campus and apple took them to the cleaners.

The issue as stated in the article that I'm pretty sure nobody actually read, is that consumer finance is a logistical nightmare they wernt prepared for. It had nothing to do with Apple.