What we need is govt sanctions against china before this goes any further. Take china off the table so companies don't have to make these hard choices that impact their competitiveness.
It shouldn't but the fact is that if China decided right now that they were done with Apple the company immediatly loses all ability to make every single one of its products.
Even the ones that arent given final assembly in China still rely on chinese produced components.
It would obviously be a very foolish move for the CCP as it would be an instant red flag to the worlds tech companies who would all start the ball rolling on moving out. Meanwhile Apple would be all but dead in the water for a good few years, with no ability to manufacture anything at all for a fairly signficant amount of time.
Unlikely as that kind of a move would have a huge global impact. That might lead to all Chinese companies (Bytedance, Xiaomi etc.) being banned in the west/US etc.
There would be consequences though.
Apple has already soured competition in computing by making the App Store the only way to reach 51+% of Americans with your software. They heavily tax it, artificially limit your ability to update and deploy, force you to devote resources to regularly adhere to Apple standards, let people place ads under your name, kill your customer relationships, force deep Apple product integrations, etc.
"CSAM device scanning" is a Trojan horse that will absolutely be abused in situations like we're seeing in China now.
Apple sells itself on privacy, yet collects more info on you than Facebook to feed their growing ads business. It's hypocrisy.
Other major tech companies looked at China and said no. Why can't Apple?
Google did, and they were. Is it too much to ask that Apple be as courageous and idealistic as Google on privacy?
In the case of western companies operating in China it's even worse because this becomes a soft power the CCP can influence on the west creating a form of self-censorship or even capture (see Ray Dalio).
A lot of companies have told themselves that their presence will be a positive influence on problematic policy of a country they want to enter, but what ends up happening is that the policy is a corrupting influence on the principles of the company.
You need to pick your battles instead of being idealist. Look at Russia. There was an opposition back in the day, but they couldn't agree between each other because of smaller differences. And now we have a complete dictatorship.