Startups are rarely profitable since a company designed for growth reinvests its revenue back into the company to create future growth (think a "ramen profitable" startup vs a "lifestyle business").
Large profits mean the company has run out of investment opportunities.
Apple is designed for growth since their inception (when they were still a startup, by anyone's definition of startup) and that haven't changed much ever since (except, perhaps, on the Scully phase... and probably now, under Cook): they kept iterating fast on new products, predating their own margins with internal competition and all those other small things companies designed for growth do...
I'd rather have a lifestyle business, which at least until the nineties we used to call just company/business.
You know, like Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe et all, despite not being startups are _just_ businesses.