Steve Jobs said a lot of things... Doesn't mean it was the truth, then or now. He was a master at deflection.
I think you may be off quite a bit on margins for most everyone you've listed. Would be interested in your source.
But of course.
Enjoy...
the profit margins under the profitability section. Operating margin is pre-tax, profit margin is after taxes are paid.
Of course, all of these figures come from the respective companies' SEC filings.
Also, as mentioned, there are a lot of assets with these two companies, especially spectrum. AT&T wanted T-Mobile for theirs. Sprint has a lot that it acquired from Clear. There's also the IP. Don't ignore the value all of those assets might provide.
Assets and intellectual property are two very different things.
There is very little innovation coming from telecoms. There are only a handful on this planet that actual do substantial R&D (NTT DoCoMo is one).
The telecoms' assets are pretty fixed for their purposes. Something like >90% of AT&T's capital investment is locked in the subscriber loop, the last mile from the central office to the individual's house or business. Stuff like copper wires, fiber optic junction boxes, cellular tower transmitters. This stuff isn't worth much to Apple.
If you're going to peruse the Yahoo Finance links above, why not take a look at Apple and AT&T's balance sheets. You can see that AT&T has a huge amount locked up in Property Plant & Equipment. Apple has very little of that category, most of their assets are in Long Term Investments (like real estate).
AT&T also has a sizable amount of long-term debt. As a matter of fact, they have a decent pile of cash in the USA, and a huge pile of it overseas. Apple's long term? Very little, less than their cash on hand. They could probably pay back their loans tomorrow, but the interest rates on those loans are probably so favorable, it's cheaper to use someone else's money than their own.
Again, being in the telephone industry is much less profitable than designing smartphones. Heck, Apple stepped away from manufacturing its own products; that's not a particularly profitable business either.
Apple could have built their own network from scratch. They could have acquired someone else. They could have functioned as an MVNO like Straight Talk. They could have done this for any cellular market on this planet, not just the USA. In the end, they decided not to do this anywhere.
Buying mobile network operators does not fit Apple's business strategy. At the end of the day, the mobile network is a dumb pipe.
Go ahead. Go to the library, switch on WiFi, turn off cellular data, then ask yourself what you are missing.