I would agree with you on most points; however, having worked within the fruit company directly on its chain of trust, I will tell you that the privacy angle runs extremely deep and is genuine. Regardless, that angle is obviously different and independent about being authoritarian within its privately-owned monopolistic marketplace.
I think the issue, though, is that people should realize that a company's "values" only go so far as to support the profit motive - thus, they're not really values at all, as the second they become an obstacle to profit, they will be jettisoned.
For Apple, who sells their own hardware and OS and has always desired tight ecosystem control, privacy usually helps their profit motive, but not always - look at their approach to iMessage. I mean, iMessage already, and always, has degraded to SMS when sending to non-iOS users. But SMS has zero encryption features and is pretty horrible for privacy. And the presence of a single Android user in an iMessage group chat means nobody gets encrypted messages. If Apple truly cared about user privacy, they could easily provide an Android iMessage client, or publish a spec. Not only don't they do that, they specifically broke the one client that worked around their intransigeance, which, despite Apple's spin, was way worse for privacy, even for users that only use iOS (assuming they ever talk to an Android user).
The whole point of having values is they provide guidelines of how to behave even when behaving that way is hard. Corporations are simply unable to commit to anything that could threaten profit growth, so we should stop pretending they're capable of having durable values.
