Microsoft made plenty of money from PCs, and plenty more selling Office on the Mac (more than Apple made on the hardware at some points), and from leveraging that marketshare into browsers, corporate messaging, servers, Xboxes (well I don't think they've actually made any money on Xbox yet, but they probably will make some eventually) etc.

Google is making plenty of money from Android, and are making money from mobile search/ads on iPhone too. It seems likely that the growth of Android, and the fact that low end Anrdroids are expanding the market for mobile browsing/search/ads is only going to aid their bottom line going forward.

Do you view Apple as simply a hardware manufacturer? Why not calculate the margins that LG and Samsung are making on the components of the iPhone 4 and just pretend that the money Apple makes doesn't count, just like apparently Microsoft's profits don't count when a laptop gets sold?

I simply want to accentuate the fact that Apple doesn't need a big part of the overall phone market to grab most of the margin available to this market. It simply needs to stay at the top. When LG sells an android phone, LG makes a couple of bucks of margin at best; google gets pennies from advertising; in contrast when Apple sells an iPhone, they get quite a hefty global hardware and software profit.

Disagree. After the initial smartphone surge of the last 3 years, most of the growth, revenue, and profit in the cell phone market will come from poor consumers outside the first world. It's hard to sell a new iPhone every year to first world consumers who already have an iPhone: it's fast enough and has every HW feature under the sun already. Sooner or later people will stop paying for roughly the same electronics in a redesigned case (no matter how sexy).

Will Apple accept much lower margins to capture the emerging market? I doubt it, but we'll see. If they don't: they need to keep inventing new product categories like the iPad to keep the whole thing afloat, and that is definitely not sustainable. I think they are nearing a top.

IMO "poor consumer in the third world" aren't that different from us. As soon as they can they want Adidas sneakers, Mercedes cars, Louis Vuitton bags and they'll want iPhones too.

About the sustainability : I think that the whole capitalist thing is pretty much unsustainable anyway. So what applies to Apple applies to everything else the same. So consider I'm talking there "all other things equal".