Sure, but my personal ability to encourage change through a boycott is limited. A large company's ability is orders of magnitude higher. And often I don't have much choice what company I buy things from based on what's available, and even when I do, they all often have similar (or different, but just as bad) problems.
But this goes into a bit of a policy/morality/philosophy question: should companies have high moral standards, and give up market share in places where they are unable to adhere to those standards? The stock capitalist answer is probably "no, gaining market share and increasing profits is more important". Personally I think that's a fundamental problem with capitalism.
The way companies are run today is built around the church of stockholder value, above every other concern. (Which sucks, but you can’t argue with reality)
Companies have no moral compass, and we should never expect the to behave in any moral way, unless someone thinks it’ll create more stockholder value than acting immorally.
I can’t help but feel that all this hand wringing about what Apple (or any other large company) should or should not be doing is a waste of time. Time that would be better spent trying to build consensus around what principles we as a society care about, and wish to project into the world. Then we should just write laws and regulation to make it happen, and to force the hands of companies.
Anything else strikes me as futile and pointless. A distraction from achieving real meaningful change.
