As far as I can tell, none of the unions were asking for more educational benefits.

That doesn't matter. With the recent wave of unionization, companies are going to be playing hardball with union busting tactics. The play of "figure out some small perk that sounds good and is news-worthy, then give it to all the non-unionized stores" is a solid one.

It's not "union busting" to negotiate with the union on new benefits that you'd otherwise give to employees. That's how the process works.

Look up the Wright Line test. A withholding to unionized workers was seen as disciplinary against unions unless the employer could demonstrate otherwise

I literally described how strategically offering a new benefit could be used to discourage unionization. I don't know how much more clear it could be that if the motivation behind the new benefit was manipulating perception of the union, that's union busting.

I wouldn't see those as educational benefits. To me it means you are able to do online courses worth USD 400 in your private time.

I don't know the hourly salary of Apple employees, but let's assume for the sake of the argument it's 50 USD/hr after taxes. And let's assume a Coursera course costing 400 USD will require 20 hours to be completed. If you do such a course during your private time you are giving Apple 12h (20 - 400/50) of your time for free for educating yourself for the company.

That being said, I personally value my free time outside of work 1.5x higher than work time. It helps me evaluating if something is worth my personal time. Means if the company offers to pay for training I am happy to do so during work time, and if I think the training can be beneficial for me in general I am also willing to contribute some PTO time in return as long as the partial (the time the company expects me to do outside work) costs of the course are bigher than 1.5x my hourly salary multiplied by the number of hours I need to spend on this.

I hope it's somehow clear what I am trying to say. Native German speaker here.

Because cash is king. Apple just found a benefit that costs them less and offered that instead.

Apple pays pretty well, this doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they would have offered these perks regardless

Starbucks did the same tactic, as did Amazon. This is a very old technique; 1880s labor war era. It was sanctioned by the court in 1948 in Shell Oil Co., Inc., 77 N.L.R.B. 1306 (N.L.R.B-BD 1948).

Maybe Apple specifically didn't do it this specific time, but there's a long rich history of exactly this happening going back 140 years. You see it in unionizing literature as a predictable and expected response.