You didn’t present one piece of evidence that $600 is a losing price point for the base model (and you even stated that explicitly). All you’ve done is shown that Apple is known for their outrageous markups; something we all can see with our own eyes.

Given they’re greedy enough to markup storage and ram so much; I’m willing to bet they won’t bother with techniques like “loss leaders”. I bet the margins are just extremely tight but that profit is above zero.