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I’d be curious to see what the audit paper trail looks like for this. Companies like Apple now have third party due diligence programs in place. Said plainly, their legal teams purchase software solutions that track their vendors, their vendor’s vendors, and their vendor’s vendor’s vendors.
Apple’s legal team is pretty robust, and I’d be shocked if they didn’t hand over a bunch of TPDD documentation to auditors to try to say “here’s all the records of us inspecting our vendors and their vendors.”
Apple will likely point to the vendor, blame them for criminal or unethical practices, and then showcase their paper trail and their system of vetting controls. Companies don’t have to be perfect, but they generally have to show that they made a legitimate and good faith attempt to work with vendors that are above board.
The point that this misses is that apple and its resources can prevent this entirely. Do u seriously expect me to believe u can invent the fucking iphone and be a trillion dollar company but u cant send someone to thoroughly investigate your supply chain. They dont know because they dont want to know because profit so they do the bare minimum to make it look as though it's not their fault so they can shift blame.
I’m a weirdo who builds compliance and auditing software for this very use case. Getting functioning hardware or software from a vendor l is one thing. You can QA whether it’s up to spec.
Vetting compliance with operational best practices is a different can of worms. You have to check compliance with random audits and investigations, and people that want to hide shit will try to work around that random checking.
All in all, it’s one of those things that probably seems simple when you’re looking at it from afar, but if you’re actually trying to do the job, you know it’s way more complicated than outsiders realize.
Sure, they can focus all their resources on making this specific line pure but then there are no resources left for the other thousand lines of materials.
But before all that it would be cheaper to own the pipeline and then we could sit around complaining about how Apple is plundering the resources of an African country.