Apple is positioning itself as The Privacy Company today, but they've benefited immensely from the attention economy over the last 15 years.
They would not have sold as many millions of iPhones, iPods (heck, even Macbooks) in the last decade, if Instagram & Facebook weren't there to suck people in to their platform (clearly, the same is true for Android). Now that the iDevices are a self-sustaining status symbol with mass adoption and institutionally-ingrained utility outside of social media, Apple no longer needs to trade user privacy to build their moat, and they can pretend that they've been on the user's side all along.
Don't get me wrong, Apple's motions here are very good. But the entire mobile computing industry was bootstrapped with addiction. Facebook and its ilk might have been the perpetrators, but they were not the only beneficiaries.