Apple Inc (AAPL)

[Altaire4_2dot0]

Why would a corporation divest themselves of a truly profitable business ?

Unless the profit margins are razor thin and the business model does not fit its core competency. In the case of IBM their consulting R&D and Enterprise level business is where the profits are .... not StinkPads.

Corporations like IBM, Xerox and DEC missed the boat on the Personal computing market because they had no clear scope of understanding what markets would emerge from this.

Dell and Walmart make money because they cut out the middlemen and sell for the lowest reasonable cost and use the old bait and switch loss leaders. If you add all the features of a comparable high end Apple system on the Dell store you realize that their not as good a value as it first appears. These businesses succeed by outsourcing to cheap labor markets in a big way at the expense of American workers.

You cannot sustain the US economy like this for very long American workers need better paying Jobs to sustain our Mass Consumption of good and services.

-Alt