These were probably definitely a lot more profitable one or two years ago. Now they're only around because they don't know how worthless they are.
When you scale it to thousands of computers mining on their graphics card + CPU, with free electricity... there's no ongoing expense to the mining. Anything you get is a profit.
And apple pay not a threat like itunes was to free mp3 torrents?
It would be good to make bitcoin easier to use at point of sale. Finding an app, paying with a QR code, making sure confirmations have been sent, etc are all clumsy.