It has been reported by people in the business -- quite a few times -- that Apple does not pay for movie or television appearances. At least not directly. Instead they provide hardware for free to be utilized for placements, at least if they're good with the content of the show and format of the placement.

"Apple products do not appear on screen by accident."

If your movie or show is about American upper middle class teens, they're probably going to have iPhones. Apple doesn't need to pay for that to be true, though competitors need to pay for that to not be true.

I mean, tonnes of times you see Apple hardware and the show goes out of its way to occlude that fact (e.g. the MBP with the Apple logo covered). There just happens to be a lot of Apple stuff in the business, and it's what people are comfortable with.

Barter is still a form of payment and all of this screen placement occurs under contract and marketing direction from Apple. I still view that as paid product placement, which is different than if the production included Apple products without any contract or guidance from Apple.

"all of this screen placement occurs under contract and marketing direction from Apple"

Your link seems to go to efforts to state the opposite. Yes Apple has a liaison and yes they work with productions, but compared to the industry this is absolutely tepid.

So to contrast it, when you see HP or Sony or other such products, 100% of the time those companies paid a six figure+ sum and provided hardware for free. When you see Apple, the going case seems to be that you can negotiate free hardware if you want, but that's it.

They aren't picking Apple to save a few thousand dollars on props. In most cases they're trying to grab a little bit of that halo themselves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXFsXnklOhY (28 second mark)

It might not be paid in all cases, but I've seen it in a few shows.

Not sure if it's "paid" product placement or just part of the contract for being on AppleTV+, but it can't be a coincidence.

In Mythic Quest, there's a scene where you can see some iOS code on one of the screens. (Which wouldn't be that odd for a MMORPG game, except that it's code for controlling the camera.)

e.g. BMW occasionally sponsors their vehicle to be in a premium film (e.g. Mission Impossible), often doing in-kind marketing agreements. Yet there are many films where BMW vehicles appear with no sponsorship whatsoever because it's logically a good candidate for the car in the situation/conveys the right image. Ford Crown Vics were every film cop car despite Ford's lack of involvement with that. And iPhones appear in a lot of situations where the most likely real-world phone would be an iPhone.

And to dispute a common misnomer, it is entirely within fair use to show brand logos presuming you aren't maligning the product in some way. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from showing a villain with an iPhone presuming you don't pretend the phone is a bomb or something, beyond Apple objecting to giving you free products.

So why do films/shows sometimes occlude the brand? Usually because someone else paid them to show their brand and they don't want brand confusion.

As an aside, elsewhere someone mentioned a show saying "promotional considerations provided by Apple". That specifically means free product, and excludes monetary sponsorship.

If anyone is curious about some of the details https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNuGdv536mM (starts around 2min in)