[anigbrowl]

I think people imagine it's like safety razors - sell the razor cheap, make money on the blades. The same strategy has worked for printers, where the real money is in ink or toner cartridges, and with phones, where the profit is in selling connection time/bandwidth over a 2 year contract. After all, Apple takes a cut of all sales through the app store and iTunes store, so some tech writers assume that that will work for anyone (even though it's taken Apple the best part of a decade to build the required infrastructure and the company had positioned its products at the top of the market almost since inception).