I am in no way letting Apple off the hook here because I am sure that they are doing exactly that. I do wonder, however, if it is effectively possible for any tech company manufacturing computers and phones to not have blood minerals as part of their supply chain.
Anyway, there’s so many other reasons to criticize Apple that “all of them do it” this time doesn’t really matter much.
Yeah I was thinking this. I hardly expect the smugglers are setting up meetings with Apple executives and selling them blood minerals. The most important part of their business is knowing how to safely sell the contraband, they obviously have discreet channels where a few well placed bribes can get the minerals into the supply chain with nobody being the wiser.
You have to catch the smugglers/miners to stop the blood minerals. Even if it were possible for Apple to root them out, they’d just keep selling to other companies.
It could be a De Beers situation where Apple has essentially cornered the market in these minerals, but I have my doubts because I doubt Apple is making hardware that needs these minerals and, say, Google is not. Sure, Apple’s M3 chip is proprietary, but I would be surprised if it needed some sort of unique mineral composition.
apples not producing the chip in house, only the design. if apple had control of the materials, it would be the non cpu/memory conponents.
