Not everything needs to be a "big tech company", but you are right big tech companies are quite similar in this respect. At critical mass capitalism seems to cause companies to lose their driving principles that made them unique - their behaviour becomes more of a mindless ecology driven solely by money.

Now look at Mozilla, it's a non profit, look at everything it does, they have never lost their principles. They will never reach the scale of Apple, Google or Microsoft, and that's a good thing.

> What makes them so unique, in your mind?

Beyond the negatives that come at their scale, Apple are doing some systematically deceitful things directly to customers that make them stand out from other companies ([edit] talking about their attitude towards customers with defective hardware). If they think that little of individual customers, how could they possibly care about an individuals privacy?