Comment by JohnBooty

    we’re conditioned when referring to a brand employer 
    like Apple to reduce them to a single point of view. 

Maybe? Americans also tend to be individualistic (often to a fault, many would say)so I'm not sure there's a cultural significance at work here.

It's probably informative that British English tends to refer to most (all?) collective nouns this way. It's not some corporation-specific thing.

Sports teams are the most obvious example - a Brit would say "Team A have defeated Team B" rather than "Team A has defeated Team B."