It's not simply that Apple is in the hardware biz, it's that Apple has a strategy for the hardware biz that enables 40% margins. They're an outlier. None of their hardware competitors have that.

If someone could show IBM a strategy for their hardware that had those kind of margins, I bet they would stay in hardware.

I suspect Apple and IBM's software and hardware businesses have different margins. Another comment said that IBM still does some software work, but has basically exited 'low margin hardware' business.

Whereas Apple's software is nearly all free (and used to supplement hardware sales) while their hardware is extremely expensive for consumers and has huge margins.