Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.

I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.

You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.