Agree with all of this. I also think Cook should get credit for the Apple Pay / Apple Card ecosystem, and for Car Play.
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.
> Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability
Do you have evidence of that? It seems like it is quite the opposite. Apple prefer to destroy not working phones or Macs instead of repairing them. They make sure independent repair shops cannot repair any of their products and design them in a way so that they fail in short space of time, so customers can either pay for repair through the nose or buy a new Mac.
Even Greenpeace acknowledges quite a bit of progress in many respects: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/GG... — keep in mind that they used to picket Apple annual meetings. Admittedly, they still have plenty of criticisms, and several of them echo yours.
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be — how much weight, size, and fragility does the repairability add, and how often is the device in fact repaired?
Personally, I think "designed to fail" is a downright false charge, and "repairability" is a trickier trade-off than repair advocates make it out to be ...
Somebody should tell the UK Parliament, they need some feedback and Apple cannot spare anybody to clear up this "downright false charge" :
I don't see "designed to fail" or any corresponding language on that page.
There is concern about repairability there. I seem to recall that the UK was a member of a trans-national organization that recently passed tougher repairability legislation, and quit that organization to be rid of all that burdensome regulation.
For the life of me, I can't understand why Apple wouldn't take the UK seriously…
Perhaps there has been an improvement in other parts of the supply chain, but the situation in DR Congo (where e.g. coltan used for capacitors is mined) seems to only be getting worse.
Apple specifically used to call out the DR Congo as one area where their supply chain responsibility was not yet up to their standards, but in recent years, they claim to have established an audited supply chain: https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Conf...
(I'm going by Apple's own claims here, would be interested to hear whether you have information contradicting these claims).
Did the child labour lawsuit [1] get settled? I think your link is describing audited Smelters and Refiners. The kids work in the Cobalt mines and Apple is one of the biggest consumers of Cobalt in the world.
As far as Wikipedia knows, that lawsuit is still pending (it would be extremely early for an US lawsuit of that complexity with that many defendants to settle).
The complaint [1] is interesting and disturbing. But I'm not convinced it's entirely in good faith. It spends a lot of time expounding on the DRC's sordid history (Whatever you want to blame Apple for, they had nothing to do with King Leopold). It cites extensively from Amnesty's 2016 report on conditions in Cobalt mining [2], but entirely fails to mention Amnesty's 2017 followup report [3] that credits many of the defendants (especially Apple) of having taken significant steps in the right direction since 2016. And the complaint appears to dismiss any positive measures taken by the defendants merely as evidence that their prior bad conduct was knowing.
Of course, a company improving their conduct does not mean they cannot be found liable for their earlier conduct, but I would not take this complaint as an objective assessment of the defendants' current cobalt sourcing practices.
In addition, under Cook, Apple also made great strides in ecological manufacturing and supplier accountability. And early on, Cook had the courage to fire a highly visible but toxic executive.