I anybody creates jobs it's the people who buy stuff and create demand. Then someone will meet that demand and potentially hire someone. I don't think Apple "creates" jobs. It hires people for certain needs that have been created by the market. If they don't fill the need somebody else will do in a market economy.
If you follow this rabbit hole deep enough, you invariably wind up right back at the beginning. The people who buy stuff and create demand for said stuff typically work for someone else, and that someone enables that person to buy said stuff by paying them a salary, in which you could argue that it’s again the employers/producers who create jobs rather than the consumers. This is not necessarily my argument, but just demonstrating that it can be argued in a way that makes it appear cyclical.
Apple isn’t creating jobs out of thin air, but they do both directly and indirectly provide distinct opportunities, despite those opportunities generally having existed in some other form (possibly in some other country) before. It might seem more accurate to say that Apple shifts jobs, but that’s an equally imprecise way of framing it.
Ignoring Apple retail employees, that might be true if you assume that the new products are running a version of either iOS or macOS and that those people working on that are considered part of creating that product.
Can nitpick it for sure. It has billions of dollars sitting around, it can choose to open a new data center, new manufacturing plant, start a cloud offering, Uber-for-dogs, whatever. Or it can continue sitting on that money. It's not automatic. That's what people mean by "job creation". Choosing to invest the money usually involves creating new positions.
Another way to look at it, is that it is location dependent. Since it is an American company, it might "hire" for a position that used to be filled in China, but the new hire is US. On the global market it "hired" someone in the US market it "created" a job.
Companies create demand by creating new products or services that people want.
You are correct that people have to want them (specifically, want them enough to spend money on them) in order for jobs to be created. But the order of operation is pretty clear from the observable evidence.
For example, there weren't crowds of people lined up outside Apple Stores demanding the iPhone in May of 2004. But after Apple invested in the product development and manufacturing of the iPhone, there were crowds of people outside Apple Stores in June 2007, waiting to pay $600 per item or more. Apple created a lot of jobs to meet that demand, but Apple had also created that demand in the first place.
