Whatever "Apple's" feelings (really, the executive team's; a corporation does not have feelings) about it, Apple is the entity that made the change.
And it is a weird kind of "force" they face. Apple, over the course of decades, has willingly made a huge investment in a state with an authoritarian government in order to pursue their goals. They did this knowing full-well that China's suppression apparatus would take great interest in Apple's pocket bugs, and that China shows little hesitation about using their leverage. Apple knew they would be asked to make these sorts of concessions. There's no chance they didn't think this over.
So when people say they "Apple doesn't have a choice", what they mean is Apple made the choice some time back.
This is the part you're wrong about: Apple, like any public corporation with effectively-zero internal controlling-share ownership, is constitutionally incapable of doing things that would make its share price drop; and is constitutionally compelled to do things that make its share price rise. Any CEO who attempts to do anything "against" the share price is fired by the board (which consists of external shareholders, not idealists) and replaced by a CEO who will serve the share-price god.
"Things that make Apple's share price rise" include "entering the Chinese market", "committing to the Chinese market", and "doing whatever customization to their products is required to stay in the Chinese market."
Which is all to say: Apple never made a choice. Free-market capitalism made this choice. If individual Apple employees don't like "the market" being their true boss, they're free to leave and work instead for a private company, or an internally majority-owned company, or a non-profit, or a B Corp. But Apple itself — the aggregate emergent behavior of the organizational entity — is not free to do anything, any more than a train is free to drive off of its rails.
This is the most wrong, reductionist take on Ford v. Dodge. Companies make decisions all the time that aren’t exactly what shareholders focused on quarterly results want. The quintessential examples are Costco and Amazon. The former pays associates above market wages and benefits, the latter had losses or broke even for years by investing for the long term.
This isn't about Ford v. Dodge. I said nothing about legal compulsion. This is about the "realpolitik" of operating a publicly-traded company.
Consider:
1. The market has an ability to "lose faith in" an equity, and do a mass sell-off of that equity, destroying/bankrupting the company — see e.g. what almost happened with British bonds a few months ago. Essentially, an uncoordinated boycott, as a result of a suddenly different output to a Keynesian beauty-contest (i.e. everyone thinks that a sufficient number of other people will sell based on the news to trigger a collapse of the price; so they have to sell first.)
2. In companies owned by majority-external shareholders — especially when those shareholders are market-makers (as is true in Apple's case: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...) — the board is very well aware of #1, and so hires/fires the CEO based in part on whether they will avoid actions that will result in the market "losing faith" in the company. (How do they know? Because those market-makers are the ones who would, in aggregate, do most such selling-off!)
That's what I mean by "Apple is constitutionally incapable of doing X" — not that they'd face some sort of corporate malfeasance suit if they did (who even cares?) but that any CEO hired by a public corporation is operating under a dagger of Damocles that they know will fall the moment they do anything to lose the public's faith in their company's stock.
Costco paying above-market, and Amazon not putting out any dividends, are not actions that result in mass sell-offs — especially because they're things the companies have done from the start (so if anyone got in on these companies in the first place, they got in knowing that these are things these companies do.)
Apple exiting China is the opposite: a stark, sudden shift in strategy, in a direction the self-interested parts of the global(!) market wouldn't care for. (Emphasis because mutual funds et al have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders, and those shareholders aren't just American, but all over the world — including China!)
That doesn't make it better, though. Plenty of companies have decided not to do business in China on ethical grounds. Hell, even Google pulled out of China way back when, a company I certainly don't think all that highly of.
Yes, not doing business in China means less revenue, and unhappy shareholders. This is why capitalism sucks: it more or less requires companies do unethical things, when not doing those things means much less money.
IMO it does. I would rather have a generally good product with concessions as opposed to no product at all. If apple, google, everyone exits out of protest, what is left? Chinese-developed tech that is 100,000% susceptible to the same government orders. At least with apple they know what they're getting.
I know it’s in vogue to blame capitalism, like our economic system is a faceless AI that decides things in a perfectly efficient market (It’s not).
Behind the curtain there are humans making decisions. They may be hedge funds, investors, board members, etc. There are humans that deliberately want to do business with China and know exactly what is happening with those workers. It wasn’t capitalism that outsourced iPhone production to a sweat shop, it was a group of real people who are morally bankrupt.
Wait what? How can you claim that capitalism requires a company do unethical things while in the same comment giving an example of a company that chose not to do an unethical things?
