They never did so. The cost of that software was embedded in the price of the computer. Thatâ(TM)s partly why Macs are historically more expensive.
No, it isn't. We know that's not the explanation because historically, Apple did NOT give you tools and free software other companies charged for. That was not true until Mac OS X, when they finally gave away a development environment. Prior to that you had to buy a compiler from a third party, as Apple didn't even offer one.
Apple did give you hypercard for a while with classic MacOS versions, but they failed to execute on that and it eventually died. It might have been popular, but all the extensions you needed to make it do anything interesting were commercial (like you couldn't even send serial characters) so it was inferior to BASIC which you got with DOS, Windows, Amiga, Atari... well, pretty much from everyone but Apple.
Which Apple are you thinking of?