Retail provides a necessary service of managing a large inventory of vetted goods readily available under reasonable terms 5-10 minutes from most everywhere america.

There is no way I'm flying to South America for a banana or to Taiwan for a toaster. Their profit is payment for this service.

Your oem provided you a device which is perfectly capable via your ISP and your vendors infrastructure of arranging products and services. Your oem is only an essential part because they insist on it.

FedEx and ford could have in theory done the same or Dell and Verizon.

Local corners stores have profit margins below 5%. Most supermarkets make barely more than 1% profit.

Both are kind of true. On individual items the margins are pretty large. But the operational costs are large and so on net the profit margin is low.

Unlike a store, Apple wants the margin without doing any of the work.

I can’t speak for every corner store, of course.

The two SF owners I know very well and have helped with their books aim for 300%. They routinely hit this.

Edit: for context the one in Noe did 2m last year.

Markup is not profit.

Agreed! What came in the door for 1x was expected (and did) leave for 3x. So 200% in the pocket?

I mean I guess if you cooked the books that's the kind of math I expect.

My local corner shop doesn't stop me shopping at a store down the road for my own safety.

Neither does Apple. You are free to buy an Android (or other) phone and to use their App Store and ecosystem.

Neither does Apple? You can side load whatever you want on an iOS device?

Sideloading is not allowed per Apple rules and requires jailbreaking which comes with a list of caveats. So technically yes as a user I can side load but as a company providing apps it's not a realistic method of app delivery for the vast majority of use cases.

Patently untrue. This is — at best — a decade old retort.

Er, what? No.

According to you, I can jailbreak and sideload my iPhone 13? Or iOS 15?

Huh, doesn't appear so: https://www.getdroidtips.com/jailbreak-iphone-13-pro-max/

This is the second time you've made this claim on the thread. Nobody knows what you're talking about. What side loading are you referring to? You mean taking advantage of the dev loophole by asking users to build and sign your code every 7 days?

Happy to help my dude! Paste me an error or screenshot or a debug log?