[matthewmacleod]

No, you're just wrong.

Corporate groups are ultimately made up of individuals. When Apple or any other company pushes a particular policy, that decision is taken by one of more individuals in that company – people who decided that this was a thing that they wanted to do. There are many reasons that they might decide to do those things – positive PR is definitely an influencing factor on that, but so is the substantial effect of individuals promoting ideas that they think are right.

You portray this as an internal group at Apple is sitting around with a discussion along the lines of "Well, our sales are slipping – how can we boost our image? Let's have a developer event for women" – as if that ever happened or even makes sense.

Corporations are not benevolent and do not have the public's best interests at heart. This does not mean that they are incapable of positive actions independent of the effect that they might have on sales.

And indeed Apple should probably be paying more in tax. I agree with that – but it doesn't affect whether the action in question is a "PR move" or not.

[exappledev]

No you're just wrong.

Corporations are made up of people, but they are not people and do not act as individuals.

Also yes conversations like "Well, our sales are slipping – how can we boost our image? Let's have a developer event for women" actually do happen all the time and it doesn't have to be women, it can be anything to help get PR like holidays or awareness months.