Many corporation do in fact perform basic research. Maybe not of the "particle accelerator" form that you ask for, and most likely less than what you'd want, but it does happen. I don't think a list of examples would change your opinion, so let's just leave it at that.
You are of course right that most of the benefits of new discoveries is of the form of externalities that don't get captured by the discoverer, or patent holder. Moreover, as you point out, we haven't seen too many fundamental, revolutionary discoveries as we've seen in first half of 20th century, to come from private labs recently. That's all true, but my response is that we haven't seen much of those recently from state-funded labs either. Science productivity per dollar is falling all around the globe, even as research spendings keep growing. Maybe there simply aren't too many science revolutions left to have?
If you don't agree with the above, and believe that there's a huge research opportunity with great ROI for society at large, why focus your ire on Apple? Why not blame the government that in your view is supposed to be funding that? Why not reduce hundreds of billions US government is spending on, say, healthcare, and instead spend that on fundamental research if it's as huge ROI as you believe it is? California has great history of publicly funded research institutions, why not just tax Apple more and spend the proceeds on fundamental research? The answer is, of course, that if California did actually tax Apple more, the resulting revenue would fund teacher's pensions and some other high speed rail to nowhere, and even less of the Apple's pile of cash would get used for research than it is when Apple is buying corporate bonds.
The truth is that fundamental research is hard, and spending more money would not necessarily bring better results. The incentive structure of doing science on public dime is already broken as it is, and there's no clear way to fix it. Focusing on that would bring bigger ROI than throwing some of Apple's cash pile into fire.