[blockross]

That mostly sounds like your typical marketing statement to me though, which is of course the best available move in their situation.

Sourcing every component for a manufacturing company's supply chain in a responsible way is hard. Especially because tracking these components is made hard by shady providers who know or - for those higher in the chain - suspect that the components they provide are produced/extracted by children and/or exploited workers. But it's basically a "don't ask don't tell" situation where investigating what happens further down the chain can only cost you money or stir up shit, so as long as consumers don't complain there's no business incentive to do that.

Obviously Apple is not the only company involved in this, but contrarily to their claim they don't lead the industry at all on this matter. If we had to elect a leader I'd argue it would rather be Intel, see this entry from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10874850