Can confirm it is a font substitution issue. When I open the PDF a different font is used (note the very distinctive “r”) which has much better (but not great) kerning.

Apple’s actually somewhat of an exception here. They actually make most of their profit from hardware, not services. In the first half of this year, Apple has made $167 billion in product sales, and $53 billion in services sales. Their cost of sales for products was $103 billion for products, and $13 billion for services. That gives $64 billion in profit from products and $40 billion in profit from services. So about 62% of Apple’s profit comes from product sales.

Teardown reports of iPhones indicate that an iPhone 15 costs $423 to make but costs $799, giving a profit margin of about 47%. This doesn’t account for shipping though, so the actual margin will be a bit lower.

Apple profits source Teardown source

Also, many GMOs were engineered to be more resistant to pests and thus need fewer pesticides

Colorado?

Most mathematicians, engineers, and scientists don’t use the asterisk symbol for multiplication. Most don’t write any symbol as it’s implicit. If they do use a symbol they would use a dot or x symbol (though never an actual x). In mathematics, the asterisk is mostly only used to represent convolutions.

Most common:

abc

Less common:

a • b • c

a × b × c

Never:

a * b * c

While to most people this doesn’t really matter (and should feel free using * for multiplication). It shows someone with minimal formal experience in mathematics using this formula