Apple is definitely not immune to stupid things. They've done a lot of stupid things.
Apple have also made tons of mistakes when it comes to security and privacy.
But I still have a hard time seeing Apple ever intentionally adding a feature that proxies all a user's encrypted connections to inspect the content and insert ads.
Tim Cook's recent speech at the Cybersecurity summit sounded pretty earnest to me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI6DvV2muDE
Given that Apple has made a priority of elevating convenience above security, I'm not sure how seriously to take Cook on the subject of the importance of privacy and security.
Gen. Alexander's talk at Def Con 2012 sounded pretty earnest, too...
Actually, reading the NSA hard drive firmware hack a couple days ago rekindled my suspicions about all the MacBook Pro failures a few years back. Apple claimed the hardware was at fault & nothing short of sending off for a pricey, clean-room extraction would get the data back. Much to my clients' relief I recovered all the data from three MBP drives for a lot less than what the 'geniuses' quoted. *It was the HD controller at fault, I managed to get them to mount and read at an extremely slow rate, but in time all was recovered.
Why would you jump to that conclusion? Apple is just a company... and through the right view-port, even something like this can appear to be "consumer oriented" to management ("we're helping customers locate products and services easier").
Recently Canonical thought it was a great idea to bake-in Amazon ads into their search lens... so ads and product placement tagged with their affiliate link were baked into your OS.
No company is immune to doing stupid things, even Apple.