Unfortunately, I don't see this changing within our culture of mindless consumerism and a governance system based on what is essentially legalized bribery ("lobbying").
That's the point of my pessimism – modifying your own behaviour does not make any difference. Even if millions of people boycotted iPhones that would still be a smaller loss for Apple than changing how they're doing things, because doing things right is suicidally expensive when most of your customers don't care. An even smaller loss would be doing some marketing to make most of boycotters ambivalent enough to forget the whole thing.
Using Apple just as an example, could be any company or government.
There's a difference between "me" and "we". "We", the majority, could, if we cared. "I", alone or even in a sizeable minority group, can't make a difference, regardless of how much I care.
People can certainly be very self centered, but a big part of this _collective_ culture of either caring or not caring for various things has been manufactured entirely artificially by governments and corporations alike.
As far as owning Apple, unless you are a major (read: majority) holder, good luck trying to make any difference because the actual majority holders want the profits, and they are not (as much) concerned about the externalities involved.
Actually they do, if enough of them care loudly enough to organize and push back. Constituent participation in the ACA Repeal debate earlier this year caused the measure to fail. They had to sneak a small, partial repeal into the huge tax bill they just passed. When the dust settles, blowback from that sneak might cost more then a few their jobs.
In practice this basically rounds to zero on most issues, especially over time.
Otherwise, what's the point of Congress if we aren't going to leave it to them to figure things out?
This holds even more true with matters that will cost the company a lot of money while giving no added value to the shareholders, such as those externalized costs by polluting the environment.
Why would any Apple shareholder willingly take a hit to their portfolio just for a "nice feeling in the tummy about having done the right thing"? Not to mention that with most publicly traded companies there's only one "right thing": Increase shareholder value, everything is optimized around that and pretty much only that.
And sure you can vote people into Congress, but what leverage do you have that those people actually stick to their word once they are there? Imho that's one of the major flaws with most representative democracies: There's only positive voting, you can't "vote out" people who didn't hold up their end, you can only try to replace them with somebody who got more votes and hope he/she keeps their word.
In the end, this is also a question of how do we want our economies to be built: For supposedly perpetual gains and growth or for a sustainability which accounts for the actual scarcity of resources not easily measured and accounted for, like a clean environment.
Six months ago I would've agreed with you. After getting a touch bar MacBook Pro for a work computer? Not so much. I don't like the ergonomics at all, but I'm more concerned about out-of-warranty costs.
Thunderbolt glitches aside (it used to kernel panic fairly regularly upon resuming from sleep, more so if I had plugged/unplugged it into the TB3 hub), it took about two weeks before the keyboard started acting up. About 50-75% of the space bar actually works. The left command key isn't centered in its bore properly and sticks with some regularity. There's something rattling inside now too.
I'm in the market for a replacement personal laptop and, for the first time, I've doubts about the longevity of the Apple product.
Also recently I finally dumped my old black MacBook off at a electronics recycling place. Apple keyboards have really gone to crap. Yes, the non-touchbar MacBook Pros had really mushy, nasty keyboards... but the touch bar slim keyboard pales even in comparison to the keyboards the polycarbonate MacBooks got.
I've used the new keyboard, and the reduced travel doesn't bother me, but the numerous reports of failed keys to the degree of "I just wanted to clean the fan"[0] level[1] is keeping me away.
My 2013 Air is still an excellent machine though...so is the Mac Mini, if only a cheaper NUC wasn't a better option in every regard other than it doesn't (natively) run macOS. :(
The early MacBook Pros and the aluminum and titanium PowerBooks had excellent keyboards. I put up with the subpar keyboards because the rest of the machine was generally pretty nice and OSX is/was leaps and bounds above the alternatives.
Not sure how nice Apple is being with replacements. My IT department was lazy and just ordered some replacement keys off the Internet for $20/each...