It's really just an abuse of language. When the financial press (or, worse, the general press) writes of "profits", they often implicitly mean "short-term profits", but that's not the same thing. In particular, Apple doesn't ignore profit; they just recognize that maximizing profit is not the same as maximizing short-term profit.

The market cap of a company reflects the market's opinion on the discounted value of future cashflow. This means that a company can't generally boost its market cap any way other than increasing its profits.