I don't understand why Apple telling Chinese factories to build PPE is helpful. There's massive worldwide demand for this stuff, the factories don't need apple's help to figure that out.
Depends. Imagine you're an Apple supplier. You're making money hand over fist, but to become a supplier to Apple you had to retool your entire factory floor, retrain a bunch of employees and basically sink a lot of capital into meeting the strict requirements. So you don't want to lose that contract. And you've probably had to sign some sort of exclusivity agreement for the privilege. I seem to recall that's not uncommon. So Apple's permission to manufacture other stuff is pretty helpful.