Great example! In retail it’s bad if there isn’t a 300%+ markup.
The fascination with making Apple a boogey man on this is bizarre. Your local corner store — which you should very much support! — has a markup that makes Apple look lazy.
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.
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.
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?
The fascination with making Apple a boogey man on this is bizarre. Your local corner store — which you should very much support! — has a markup that makes Apple look lazy.