Agreed on the bulk of your points, however: As a percentage of revenue, Apple makes less from the iTunes Store today than they did six years ago. They operate

Agreed on the bulk of your points, however: As a percentage of revenue, Apple makes less from the iTunes Store today than they did six years ago. They operate it close to break-even as a means of selling more hardware. http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/63878-image/Apple-Revenues-Slopegraph2.png http://i-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/63878-image/Appl... Running the store means: - Employing god knows how many app reviewers - Employing dev relations, marketing, design and other support roles - Paying for credit card transaction fees - Maintaining server infrastructure at extraordinary scale with ridiculous uptime requirements None of this is cheap. And none of the resulting revenue, in the hundreds of millions, comes anywhere close to the juice of hardware revenue, in the tens of billions.