Some middlemen are completely useless, others play a critical and necessary role in providing access to a product, and there is a whole spectrum in between.
There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).
Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.
In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.
Thank you for your thoughtful response! I think we’re in full agreement — which is weird on the Internet.
> There is some reasonable cost involved […]
Apple is just taking a profit like your corner store, COOP, Migros, etc. Is it reasonable? Don’t know! Are profit margins how most business operate? That is for sure.
There is some reasonable cost involved in sourcing food from different countries reliably, regularly, in quantity into your local supermarket. Sure they take a profit, but they invested in infrastructure and employ people to put it all together, without which you wouldn't have a good selection of affordable food... They add a tangible value, and in fact effectively reduce the cost of the end product through scale (it's more cost efficient to deliver a million oranges over a long distance than single oranges in a disorganised manner).
Apple are not part of this equation, without Apple it would still exist, it might only be slighly less convenient to pay and select via a native app.
In short, Apple is an artificial middleman... they are at the extreme end of the useless scale, the rent seekers with an outrageous markup. They are not part of the chain of people involved in delivering food or picking up passengers, they are at most a transaction fee handler, and even then they are forcibly a transaction handler. Everything about it is artificial.