A) The problem is that so much of our lives is run by giant companies that are almost all horrible, to the point where if you don't want to support businesses that are evil you basically need to live in an Amish community or something.
B) It's still a logical fallacy to dismiss someone's stance because they are a hypocrite in one way or another. If I say "Don't smoke, it's bad for you" after eating bacon, the fact that bacon is also bad doesn't mean I'm wrong to say not to smoke.
a. You say that like there's never a choice. In the cartoon, the woman in the first two panels doesn't like Apple exploiting Chinese sweatshop labor. Neither do I, which is why I've been using BlackBerry phones for years. Maybe my next one will be a Fairphone.
Foxconn, the iPhone manufacturer famous for the number of suicides at its factories, also made phones for BlackBerry. Maybe Fairphone does better, idk, but it is in fact genuinely hard to buy a smartphone that wasn't made using Chinese labour under shitty conditions.
Increasingly, smartphone ownership is in fact a requirement to participate in society (Internet access is, definitely, and I don't think non-smartphone electronics are much better re: labour conditions). So I think the point is equally apt. For most people, not paying money to a company engaged in some sort of terrible business practice you hate is not a realistic option.
I know BlackBerry phones were manufactured in China for a few years, but I don't think that's accurate, since The Good Shopping Guide gave them their top rating in human rights. As for Fairphone, I think you might find it interesting. Unfortunately, they don't sell outside Europe at the moment, but I can always buy secondhand.
And in any case, China was losing its position as "the world's smartphone manufacturer" even before the Wuhan virus.
Foxconn-BlackBerry deal. The current manufacturer of BlackBerry phones is
TCL, also a Chinese corporation (with their own labour issues, ofc,
see for instance). I don't know what The Good Shopping Guide bases their rankings on, they don't provide explanations or sources.
The article about shifting to Vietnam does not provide numbers for how many phones are now produced in each country, but in any case what makes you think labour conditions are any better there? Cheaper labour is specifically cited as a reason for shifting production*; usually factories can't get their labour cheaper than sweatshops by
not being sweatshops, which is precisely why sweatshops exist.
*"Vietnam’s labour force is half as expensive, and seven years younger on average, than China’s." is certainly a sentence that fills me with confidence about labour conditions.