> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research?

The intended audience is other researchers in your field, not the general public.

Your reputation as an academic or researcher rest on your publication record (plus your ability to land funding). If you publish highly-cited papers in prestigious journals or conference proceedings, you're considered among the best in your field. This opens the door to promotions, better job offers, etc.

Researchers at Apple have historically forgone the ability to publish. They have no reputation in the field. This significantly harms their ability to get a job elsewhere as a researcher.

When you get to college, you'll be very disappointed to discover that's that's literally the only reason people publish in most cases. It ain't for the money, that's for sure. It's how you make a name for yourself amongst your peers in the same field.

You might get a sneak peek at the publish-or-perish dynamic to a lesser degree when you get to high school- sometimes you can get into special programs where you have a chance to help out with research being done by college students. If you get into a really good program and really distinguish yourself, you can even get your name alongside theirs on the paper.

Unfortunately, you will find that believe it or not, those college students are not already working out which color of Ferrari to buy with their sweet advance from SIGGRAPH or wherever. I think they deserve it personally, because I really care really hard about pushing science and engineering forward, but sadly the big bucks are still going to NFL players and pop stars instead.

Professional prestige. If you need an ELY5 answer plese just request one...

> Most people won't be able to understand, let alone care, about your research.

This is what lead me to get out of research and start my first company.

I was in a research group at PARC doing work on programming language epistemology and semantics. The group papers were typically mostly predicate calculus. At a POPL our group lead presented a paper; I was in the audience. After the paper we got polite and even enthusiastic applause, but two people in front of my in the audience spoke during the applause: Q: "Did you understand that?" A: "Not a single word"

I realized there were perhaps a dozen people in the world who even understood what we were working on, and of those 12 at least 10, if not all 12 of them were smarter/understood the subject much better than I.

It really didn't seem like it was going to make a difference to the universe.