Apple Made $6.5B USD by No Longer Providing Accessories with New iPhones | Hacker News Reader

Apple Made $6.5B USD by No Longer Providing Accessories with New iPhones

hypebeast.com

117 pointsakudha188 comments

Original source is the DailyMail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10607077/Apple-make...

As is typical for the outlet, the sources for the figures include stirring attributions like, “critics argue” and “experts believe”

They also assume that everyone who bought an iPhone bought a charger at full price directly from Apple.

I'd be surprised if even half bought a new charger, most people who needed one probably just got a cheap one from Amazon.

It's funny to me if it's true that people buying $1000+ phones would all be buying those low-end white-label chargers. They are somewhat notorious for being unreliable, and even dangerous.

Edit: Yes, there's decent, branded, 3rd party chargers too. Just commenting on the really cheap ones.

I suspect it’s a mix, but if you stay off the absolute bottom of the barrel, there are plenty of third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.

Anecdote of one: wife bought an iPhone 13 mini yesterday at an Apple store and turned down all the hard sells on accessories and AppleCare.

> third-party USB supplies and wireless chargers that work great and are significantly cheaper than the Apple ones.

Have you checked those chargers against the UL certification database to confirm that the people who check the "won't catch on fire" part of the "works great" is actually true?

I do not cross-reference the UL database on each of my online shopping trips. I trust that the middle-priced brands (Amazon, Anker and the like) are not selling crap.

That's mighty self-assured, given Amazon's track record of selling (and commingling) crap.

I still mostly use the charger that came with my HTC Legend. It has been under the bed and its usbA port has seen at least three types of cables over the last decade (12 years even I think).

The Anker iPhone accessories like cables, chargers, and charging pads are MUCH higher quality than Apple’s. Their cables are so much better than Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage. You wonder why Apple would damage their “high quality” brand image with their terrible accessories.

How many of your Anker chargers carry a UL or other safety approval mark on them?

All of Apple's do.

Having a UL mark is not an indication that a product is 100% safe to use, but it at least shows that the manufacturer cares enough about making a safe product to do the paperwork and have a 3rd party like UL review their design and manufacturing to ensure the product is as safe as can be.

How many people even know what a UL safety approval mark is or cares about it's existence on a charger?

Effectively no one, unless you're an engineer who has part of their job be UL compliance or until you as a consumer have to talk to an insurance company about why your house burned down.

Mine is IEC 62368-1 conformant (the corresponding UL standard is also 62368-1). It also has a TÜV SÜD marking for US compliance.

That's good to hear! Maybe Anker has improved in this area since the last time I bought one of their products.

>Apple’s garbage cables which fray and break after a few months of careful usage

We must be using them very differently then.

I still have charger cables for my original iPod (2007) which I use regularly that are not broken or frayed.

Also from older phones - which is one of the reasons I was happy that they stopped shipping all the chargers and headphones as I still already had them from previous purchases.

Cableitis is unfortunately a wasteful by-product of our current electronics culture.

Anecdotally, people I know who aren't tech people and who have expensive phones almost always have cheap chargers and off-brand charging cables. The general public seem to perceive that the phone is the valuable thing, a charger or cable is a commodity so they're all the same and work equally well/poorly.

Clearly this is misguided, but I think if I tried to explain how to shop for a good and reliable USB charger to my mom, dad, brother, or sister that they'd each roll their eyes at me.

Of note, the last time I bought a new multi-port USB charger (a few years ago now), it was very difficult to find one which was reasonably priced and which carried the UL (or equivalent) mark in the USA. Another previous multi-port charger I had bought made by Anker had claimed "getting UL approval" in the product description and showed the mark in the pictures on Amazon, but once delivered the physical charger did not have any safety marks present on it. The Anker charger failed after a year and Anker sent me a replacement under warranty, the replacement also did not carry any safety mark.

For some people, a $1000+ phone comes with bragging rights. The charger? Not so much.

I'd wager that's one reason some people buy the expensive phone and the cheap charger. The other is simply that most people can't tell the difference between chargers - they both charge, right?

Ok worthless claim then. I did buy 4 usbA-lightning cables to put in several places (iPhone 12 mini is my first iPhone) though. But not from Apple.

I also have a non-Apple MagSafe charger in the car. The only thing I hardly ever use is the included usbC-lightning cable ironically. They could have earned some more money on me.

Or they already owned an old charger

For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Per...

For those who don't know, much of Wikipedia should be considered "generally unreliable" by the public.

Looking for information on Wikipedia is like asking a bunch of strangers at a bus stop and then going with the loudest voices with the most free time.

All the people at the bus stop will also largely agree that the Daily Mail is unreliable, so I can't find fault in your argument ;)

Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though. In the US, the Mail has carved out a niche as a benign entertainment site - in the UK it is a tedious, dangerous rag that is effectively OAN in print form.

But it was used as an authority figure when their editors and government are quite controversial.

On average it's as good or better than printed encyclopedias. We don't go around saying Britannica was a big book of lies but it unknowingly published many inaccuracies and urban legends. They did an honest effort, and we know what the results of that look like statistically these days.

> Wikipedia being unreliable does not make the Daily Mail reliable though

Perhaps, but Wikipedia's unreliability means that it is not in a position to meaningfully comment on reliability of other sites.

Unreliability insofar as Wikipedia is concerned means it’s articles are of varying quality. That’s a fact somewhat inherent in its design.

Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality? That page’s findings are not public-editable, for the record.

> Why do you feel like that prevents their moderation teams from being arbiters of source quality?

The same reason I don't feel like Fox News or Breitbart provides a reliable view of the news, political bias.

A lot has been written about wikipedia's political bias. I don't care to rehash the entire debate, but let's start with the fact that one of the original creators believes it has a problem with bias: https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/

Is that the end-all be-all? Probably not, but it's reasonably concerning.

This has not been true since at least 2005: https://www.nature.com/articles/438900a

Now someone will say Nature is unreliable and we need to wait for findings to replicated in more applicable domain-specific journals…

Which is why it's remarkable that the quality of Wikipedia is so high.

I've found english wikipedia to be quite reliable actually, especially for scientific knowledge. It's an excellent source of references too.

It's quite literally saved me in school too. Once I had to present my work in class and my classmates wrote a few things in the slides they didn't fully understand. Of course my PhD professor zeroed in on that. She was asking them question after question and nobody was answering. She asked me and I answered correctly because I had spent days reading about bacterial gene transfer on wikipedia out of curiosity.

I actually hated that subject until I discovered how awesome it is thanks to wikipedia. She would make us memorize seemingly endless factoids about all kinds of micro-organisms. I hated every second of it and nearly failed that class. Then I started reading about this stuff on wikipedia and everything changed.

Memorizing those factoids builds the base for appreciating the really cool stuff. It's like a language class: you learn a bunch of vocab words so that you can read amazing literature or visit far-off places.

Science classes are really bad about motivating this. I don't think I would have made it through the intro-class grind if I hadn't worked in a lab first. Language classes offer an interesting parallel, in that you can either have the old school "learn these 250 flashcards" or more enjoyable short stories that build up to something.

On wikipedia I learned a lot more facts and it didn't even feel like memorization. I still remember the feeling.

I started with the general bacteria article on wikipedia. I was having trouble absorbing this knowledge and didn't know what to do, so I just randomly searched it on wikipedia and started reading. I didn't even expect anything but I got hooked on it. I especially remember reading about bacterial flagella and the little molecular engines that power them. Then I learned about how it could have somehow evolved into the type 3 secretion system, an almost literal needle some bacteria have that they can use to inject toxins into cells. Totally awesome, and it's just one of many bacterial virulence factors I had been mindlessly memorizing. I just kept following links and reading everything, the microbiology articles are so detailed. My attitude to this class completely changed, I was filled with curiosity once again. I was happy to go to the lab and experiment with our cultures.

Due to wikipedia I learned even more than what I needed for my class. I started discovering all sorts of cool stuff I had no idea even existed in nature. My favorite example is the article about cnidocytes, explosive cells that deliver stings. They have an organelle that stores large amounts of calcium ions. When triggered, the ions are released and the massive osmotic gradient causes a rapid influx of water into the cell, increasing volume and applying absurd amounts of acceleration to the stinger which is ejected outside and into the target on a nano- to microsecond time scale.

That analogy only works if you also ask the strangers at a bus stop for sources. Like wikipedia, some won't give them to you, others might give you the daily mail, and others might give you reputable peer reviewed research.

Then which one would you trust?

AFAIK, wikipedia doesn't reference itself as a reliable source for obvious reasons.

Yes, but it has easily the best homepage design of any news site on the Internet.

I dare you to scroll to the bottom without clicking on something!

> For those who don't know, the Daily Mail is considered "generally unreliable" by Wikipedia.

This is kind of like two pathological liars arguing over who's the bigger liar. Wikipedia is not all that reliable itself. It has a well-known political bias and junk gets through all the time. See the recent debacle over the Scots language page.

That's ironic. Considered "generally unreliable" by a source that could itself be aptly described as "generally unreliable."

It's probably true, but at this point Wikipedia is also considered "generally unreliable" for politically controversial subjects

The Daily Mail is considered and described by many using much more colorful language than simply "unreliable". Especially in the UK.

That said, is the Daily Mail article factually wrong? How many purchasers of iphones end up buying a new charger and power cable?

they also claim that the changes reduced shipping costs by 40% (not even a slightly realistic figure)

Hating on apple is fine, but right now a lot of the tech world is looking like uncles that believe facebook posts over fauci.

I consider this one of the more egalitarian moves Apple made, and naturally they made a robust profit on it as well.

Apple invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry, and always shipped a high-quality charger and headphones with the iPhone, something which started with its ancestor the iPod.

As a result, everyone else had to sell... some kind of earbuds and charger. These didn't have to be good, but they did have to be in the box.

Apple had the margin to make these quality: you can get better earphones but not better chargers. Their competitors had to put the same type of object in the box, cutting into already slim margins and often shipping something which sounds bad, and that makes the iPhone look better.

But as the market leader, they had the ability to say "The best phone in the world (reality distortion field!) no longer comes with earbuds or a charger. We figure you have enough chargers, and probably like the headset you have, and if you want new ones, we sell them".

So everyone else can just drop the shipping of mandatory e-waste, just to keep up with the iPhone. It was a bad Nash equilibrium, and only the market leader was in a position to break it.

Feel free to discuss the missing headphone jack and the multibillion dollar AirPods platform in the replies!

excellent points.

I'm still upset about the 3.5mm headphone jack to be honest.

I'm still upset about the 3.5mm headphone jack to be honest.

I'm still upset† about the 30-pin connector. I can no longer stick my iPhone into the slot on the top of my clock radio just so trillion-dollar Apple can lock me into its 30% walled accessories garden that prevents me from doing what I want with my own hardware that I paid for and have no other options. (Did I miss any HN clichés?)

(I'm actually slightly upset† about the iPhone not coming with a cleaning cloth anymore. I've been using my original one for 15 years, and it's starting to get worn out.)

† For varying definitions of "upset."

This comes across as mocking, did you mean it that way? I wasn’t a fan of proprietary connectors either.

3.5mm jack is as standard as it gets. Plug your phone into any audio equipment, like a guitar amp with a 3.5mm -> 1/4” adapter.

Bluetooth = tons of exotic e-waste, thank you very much.

For years, I rolled with a BT adapter that produced the signal on a standard 3.5mm audio jack, and a typical "aux" cable. Never failed -- if I ended up at an unplanned gathering, it took 3 of us to make music happen, and it wouldn't have been possible without my adapter.

I like to have the 3.5mm jack too, but the reality is that the vast majority of users don't miss it. That's because they either don't use headphones at all, or because they prefer wireless ones anyway. So as much as I personally don't like it, it makes sense from Apple's POV.

The arguably bigger annoyance and source of e-waste is that iPhones still use a proprietary charging port instead of USB-C.

The amazing thing to me is: They removed the headphone jack 6 years ago and people are still complaining about it. I have a feeling, 20 years from now, some of these people will be sitting in their old-folks homes, not remembering who their kids are, but will still be complaining about Apple getting rid of their headphone jacks. I've never seen such attachment to a feature.

Detachment from the replacement. I only upgraded in the last few months. Not one of the people that budgets $1G/year to own a phone.

Am I complaining loudly? No. Do I want to ditch my wired things and get deeper into bluetooth insecurity, battery life issues and e-waste of bluetooth devices? Definitely no.

Since I drive a stick better than my CVT shifts, and I can get much better gas mileage, I also prefer that older technology.

Not going to look for ways to mock on people here, seems to be a thing today!

the look on my wife's face when I told her she couldn't listen to music and charge her phone at the same time...

> Apple invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry

They did, huh? All by themselves?

Yes. They did. All by themselves.

Yes. Before the iPhone, the only smartphones anyone really had were Blackberrys. And those weren't "slabs of glass".

Really? How about palm or pocketpc? There were mobile phone versions before iPhone iirc

Which ones were slabs of glass?

Most of them? The face buttons were usually minimal, with 2-4 buttons plus maybe a d-pad

>"The name was introduced by Microsoft in 2000 as a rebranding of the Palm-size PC category. Some of these devices also had integrated phone and data capabilities, which were called Pocket PC Phone Edition or simply "Smartphone"." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_PC

>"The first-generation iPhone was announced by then-Apple CEO Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007. " https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

but... that's not true. The HTC HD2, arguably the best Windows Mobile phone, wasn't a slab of glass - it was plastic, just like most (if not all) of the flagships.

Are you seriously making the distinction based on a plastic body vs glass body

That's just drawing an arbitrary line in the sand not based on technological innovation so you can day "apple wuz first"

These devices are defined by the amount of screen and the touch interaction combined with mobile connectivity, not by plastic vs glass body

Also, the iPhone 1 had an aluminum back, not glass so your point doesn't even make sense:

>"The iPhone's back cover is made out of brushed aluminum, a soft metal"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_(1st_generation)

The original comment was:

> Apple invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry

Not sure what you're going on about.

From my understanding "slab of glass" refers to the all-screen design. Not the material of the back cover

The original iPhone still had a front-surface, physical button

Didn't numerous iPhones have front home buttons until recently?

But I think this helps my point, in that the iPhone was only a marginal improvement on already existing tech instead of the "first" to do whatever

Meanwhile, outside of the US...

> Before the iPhone, the only smartphones anyone really had were Blackberrys

Because the US sucked for mobile phones until Apple beat the providers into submission. The rest of the world used Nokia or Sony Ericsson smartphones that had multitasking, apps, web browsers and any other definition of a smartphone.

That's not counting Palm, Windows Mobile and others.

Moving to an on screen keyboard in exchange for more screen real estate when not typing was a big market risk. Not everyone was convinced that consumers would prefer that to a physical keyboard.

Palm had it's stylus and simplified hand writing recognition, which was also a very different approach.

How many of them had a keyless multitouch interface before 2007?

Quite a few, LG even won design awards for their multitouch keyless phones with app store before the iPhone was released.

If there were "quite a few", could you name one?

If you're alluding to the LG Prada, it didn't have multitouch — no pinch zooming, no flick scrolling, etc.

The LG Prada and the other phones which later led to the KP500/501 and similar phones (I had them as teen) had semi-multitouch.

It could handle two fingers, as long as one of them stayed in place and only the other one moved. That’s how it implemented something kinda like pinch zooming and scrolling. Android in fact copied the same method for its early touchscreen devices and supported it until relatively recently.

I love how conversations conveniently slide off just to argue about stuff.

The comment said "invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry".

That's it, that's true, there was no "slab-of-glass" smartphone industry. The comment did not say "invented the smartphone industry" — all comments after it are just unrelated.

Yes there was there were smartphones 10 years prior. No they were not slabs of glass.

Indeed. Particularly the bit about how pre-iPhone products met "any other definition of a smartphone". To me, multitouch is the sine qua non of a smartphone.

Hey, thanks for parsing my sentence correctly. That's been an issue in some of the replies.

people have amazingly poor reading comprehension lol

You are still missing a huge point with Blackberry, which was the part I responded to.

Not related at all to what I quoted and responded to. Also not a prerequisite for being a smartphone. It's what's inside, not outside.

I think if you grabbed someone off the street and handed them a phone that didn't scroll when they dragged their finger across the screen, and then asked if they considered it a smartphone, the overwhelming majority of such people would say no. But you and I can disagree on that prediction.

You may be right about that, but a smartphone had a definition back in the day. There were touchscreens on non-smartphones and there were smartphones without a touchscreen, it's the software that makes it smart, not the hardware, whatever the man on the street says.

The US didn't get the penetration the rest of the world had by Nokia and others so you folks had a raw deal and shitty carrier-neutered phones until Apple came along.

(also I think you once helped me recover my reddit account over IRC like 10 years ago so thanks if that was you)

It was both gradual and quick.

Gradual because we had the Palm Pilot 10 years before https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PalmPilot

Quick because I think the iPhone had the first capacitive touchscreen in that class of devices. Being able to touch with a finger tip instead of with a stylus or a finger nail is a big improvement for the UX. BTW it made it to the iPod only in 2010.

The phone was subpar in Europe (2G and we have had 3G since 2003) but it sold really well because of the innovative interface and the look of it.

I've bought a lot of Android devices and all which were of a well known brands like Samsung, Lenovo, HTC, Motorola had good chargers as well as good headphones in the box. Only cheap non-brand devices did not include headphones but the chargers were average amazon-type cheap but ok chargers.

Also there's often the case where you buy stuff like led flashlights which don't come with a charger they do have an USB charging cable in the box.

> always shipped a high-quality charger and headphones with the iPhone, something which started with its ancestor the iPod.

Phones with proprietary connectors always shipped with chargers. Probably most micro USB phones as well. Apple was not special in this regard.

Likewise with earbuds, many phones, smart and dumb, also shipped with earbuds or a headset. Apple was leveraging the iPod name to sell the iPhone so omitting earbuds would have been conspicuous.

iPhone still ships with the cord, all you need is a brick or other power source with the increasingly-common USB-C connector.

"increasingly-common", my macbook and now my PS5 have USB-C female ports for charging stuff. That's the grand total of places I can use these cords (and I doubt the PS5 will charge my phone). It's a slow rollout best.

At least the PS4 USB ports worked perfectly fine for charging arbitrary devices, though I wouldn't expect fast charge voltages out of them even if USB-C is more standardised on that stuff than older fast charge implementations.

I know that I can't charge the PS5 controller off the switch dock, at least. I never have to charge the Pro Controller while the PS5 controller only lasts a few hours, so that would have been handy.

>iPhone still ships with the cord

Yeah, the cord that's not compatible with their previous gen chargers, which they claimed everyone had enough of at home, and had dropped to "save the environment". Dick move.

Yeah, I remember a Sony Ericsson phone I had in the early 00s that definitely came with headphones and charger (for it's proprietary connector) long before any of the current major players were even in the phone industry.

Bring back the headphone jack!

The worst part is I've only been able to get Apple's 3.5mm to lightning cable to let you listen to a phone call. It's never worked when I bought a 3rd party cable.

The Apple adapter is thin trash that wears out after a few weeks.

Get the UGREEN Lightning to 3.5mm cable. I've been using them daily for years now with my Sennheiser Game One headset and the only problem I have encountered is a bit of curling from the braiding.

Good news, there's a fix for this! The Samsung phone I purchased this week has a lovely headphone jack which works perfectly, as well as several other advantages which I won't go into.

See, I thought that til I resurrected my ipod. That cable snags on EVERYTHING. Apparently I had a bunch of muscle memory things to keep that from happening. (I remember feeding it down my shirt and into the ipod in my pocket.

I do NOT miss headphone cables.

Sennheiser CX300-II worked fine for me and I had somewhere around 5 pairs of them. CX3.00 with soft-touch coating on the wires snagged on my own clothing. Latest CX300S (with soft-touch wires too, but different from CX3.00) are fine again. And I greatly appreciate what I don't need to care to charge another device and can just leave them in the pocket for next time I need them, be it tommorow or in two weeks.

> Apple invented the modern slab-of-glass smartphone industry, and always shipped a high-quality charger and headphones with the iPhone

Rechargeable portable electronics always came with chargers, long before iPod or iPhone came around

"High-quality" is the focus of that sentence.

Apple didn't invent high quality

Nobody claimed they did.

Yeah yeah, I also wanted to say... So far I repaired 1 charger, bought 3 or 4 new and eventually even found out that an iPhone charger I have is likely to have an electrical problem. That said, with the USB-C craze I think things got a little better

Every single Apple charger/cable I've ever had has frayed or gotten close to it, FWIW.

I'm not mistreating them. My ancient Thinkpad chargers are doing fine and they see lots of use. They're thick and ugly, with the cables themselves almost as big as the old barrel jack connectors, but they still feel safe and reliable.

Heck, my old Nintendo DS chargers are still fine too.

I deliberately didn't mention the cables, and I'm happy to slag on their quality with you.

Glad they finally did the right thing and separate the chargers, which are excellent, from the cables, which are.. white. They're also spec-compliant, which matters more and more with Thunderbolt and the like, but I find that any other reputable cable is also spec-compliant, and is going to last me about three times as long.

I do mistreat them, to be clear, but at that price I should get away with it.

Are the Apple chargers high quality, though? They are compact, true.

Apple’s chargers have long been known as over-engineered in safety and reliability, e.g. not catching fire, dealing with “dirty” power better than most, etc. Look up Big Clive’s videos on them.

Many children today do not know what a headphone jack is, and by the time they mature into adults, they may still have never seen one in their lives, much less used one.

My nephews (all under 16) have only experienced "always on" internet. The idea you had to co-ordinate with family on using the phone line via weird screeching noises, only to browse at a slow speed was lost on them.

I like to razz my extended family who are all internet addicts now. They told me shit like, "go outside more" but now they are effectively crippled without their devices. Gotta love boomers.

Not really that unusual - I'm 27 and missed out on dial up

That's nonsense, they all use headphones on their chromebooks at school.

> As a result, everyone else had to sell... some kind of earbuds and charger. These didn't have to be good, but they did have to be in the box.

Are you implying that before the iPhone nobody sold chargers or earbuds with the phone? If so, you are massively wrong. Source: tech journalist, pre-iPhone, reviewed hundreds of phones.

At that point in time most chargers were proprietary though. These days, you’ll be hard-pressed to find an AC adapter for a phone that doesn’t just have either a USB-A or USB-C port, and the cable you’ll need is almost certainly the same one that you used for your last phone. Neither were typically the case pre-smartphone.

And the reason for that was not Apple's will, it was EU legislation.

I think mini and micro USB were pretty common when the iPhone debuted but maybe I only higher end phones. You probably got a lot of trash chargers though, like an AC wart hardwired to a uUSB plug or some mini USB to DC barrel jack adapter abomination.

On higher-end phones yes; I had a BlackBerry at the time which I believe had mini-USB. Most of my friends had feature phones at that point in time though, and those were notoriously nonstandard.

yeah but what if you don't have a charger or headphones. why should you pay the same or (more!) for less. at least take it out of the cost to retail.

>Apple had the margin to make these quality: you can get better earphones but not better chargers.

Are Apple chargers really better than those shipped with Android devices?

Apple chargers, as well as the earphones were notoriously low quality, especially the cables. They would almost always break or degrade around the connections.

The cables often have lacked strain relief, so I agree with you there. But I've had great experiences with Apple chargers. I've definitely not had great experiences with various 3rd party chargers.

I believe if Apple had played this smarter, this wouldn't have become a thing e.g.:

- Don't remove free accessories the same year you switch connector on one end (USB A to C), necessitating an additional purchase.

- Don't proclaim the environmental benefits if it is clear that Apple (not also the consumer) is the only one gaining the convenient financial benefits.

- Do some promo for the first generation without accessories, for example "only pay for shipping" on a charging brick (one per device).

With the promo Apple would have saved less money, but only the first generation without accessories, and it would have been a huge PR "buffer" that would have made them look like the good-guy.

But instead they green-washed the whole thing, which nobody really believed, and came off looking cheap. Which for a company that promotes itself as kind of quasi-premium product isn't what you're going for.

The move to USB-C chargers did not "necessitate an additional purchase". All the decade-old chargers and cables still work fine.

None of your points make any sense, actually. It's not true that nobody other than Apple gained financial benefits, not that anyone should expect otherwise when a company sells a product, really.

> The move to USB-C chargers did not "necessitate an additional purchase".

iPhones still ship with the cable. The cable is Lighting to USB-C. The previous generation of iPhone shipped with Lightning to USB-A (and including a USB-A power brick).

Therefore, to use the cable that Apple provides with the phone, an additional purchase is required, even if you have a legacy power brick.

The first year Apple switched from USB-A to USB-C was also the same year they stopped including a compatible power brick.

> Therefore, to use the cable that Apple provides with the phone, an additional purchase is required, even if you have a legacy power brick.

I have managed to never buy a USB-C brick. I use the cable that came in the box in my car or mophie battery pack or laptop, and it works fine in both places with no additional purchase.

My “main” charger is wireless (actually a Samsung one), so I don’t even have a “legacy” charger in the mix.

If you have a legacy iPhone power brick there's a good chance you also possess legacy Lighthnig to USB-A cable. It's more troublesome for those who migrate from Android and only have micro USB to USB-A cables and USB-A chargers.

Depending on how old the USB-A Apple power brick is, it may lack partial or full support for rapid charging. Which to unlock, would still require an additional $20 purchase.

Granted. Of course. It also requires an additional purchase to use the other, superior way of charging that's built into new iPhones, which is MagSafe, of course.

But my point was limited to dismantling the repeated claim in this thread that moving to USB-C chargers somehow "required" a new purchase, or somehow meant that all the old chargers and cables don't work. Neither of those things is true and I'm tired of reading those distortions.

Obviously quick charging could not work at full speed with the old 5W chargers, and you can't magically make USB-A support more power, so the move to USB-C was necessitated by the ability to charge more quickly. But full backwards compatibility has been maintained, as much as is possible. That's all I'm saying.

False.

I've owned android devices up to galaxy s10. All recently used USB A to C.

Switched to iphone. Only shipped with Lightning to USB C cable, no brick.

All my bricks, like I imagine most people, are USB A female.

I had no way to charge my brand newdevice and had to go out to buy a USB C female charging brick. Like most people.

> I […] had to go out to buy a USB C female charging brick.

Why didn't you buy a wire instead?

"Most people" is something you're making up. I'll wager it's a minority.

Most iPhone consumers either had a USB-C charger before, or a USB-A charger with Lightning cable from a previous iPhone, or they have a recent Mac with USB-C ports, or they have a recent PC with USB-C ports, or they have an iPad and a USB-C charger from that.

Probably it's a tiny minority who are in your situation.

Would you have rather paid extra for the phone and not gotten to choose your preferred charging method? This way you can go out and get a MagSafe charger, which is better anyway.

They didn’t need to play this smarter. The amount of people who switched away from iPhone as a result of this move hasn’t cost them more than the billions in profit mentioned in the headline.

Are there numbers to support this? Genuinely curious, not being a jerk. This seems really difficult to prove.

Anecdotally speaking I found this to be an incredibly smart tradeoff for Apple to make, but I'm just speaking from product-manager spidey senses. I love cutting.

I don't think $20 on top of $700-$1400 is making anyone blink. One will bitch about it and proceed with the purchase, if needed.

> - Don't remove free accessories the same year you switch connector on one end (USB A to C), necessitating an additional purchase.

The iPhone 11 Pro already came with USB-C, so that already did not happen.

> came off looking cheap

I don’t think anyone really cared. Who bought Apple will continue buying Apple, this move has zero downsides for Apple. We need to leave the tech bubble to see it.

I know people are going to chime in about how a phone is expensive and how it's shocking that they are upcharging you for accessories that you need in order to use your phone, but for me, the landscape has changed.

For reference, I don't buy a new phone that often. Everyone else I knew had a smartphone by the time I got one... all my friends and family. And yet... these days, I am drowning in iPhone chargers. There are chargers all over the house. Chargers in every room. Chargers packed in case I travel. I have a box of lightning cables.

And then there's a small box of Apple earphones, barely used.

Well, when we order new phones for people here at work we have to buy all that crap instead of just giving them what comes in the box.

Isn't there a ton of stuff you need to buy for someone at work? Phone, charger, cable, laptop, ethernet cable, cubicle walls, ergonomic chair, desk, lanyard, ID badge, company branded water bottle... even at small companies the charger seems like such a small thing.

Curious: do you ask new employees whether you have to buy that for them?

Your company buys people phones as opposed to expecting people to have their own phone?

I think leaving out the charger would have been a lot less controversial and appeared much less like a cash grab if they hadn't at the same time switched from USB-A to USB-C, requiring everyone to get a new charger.

It's tiring to keep hearing this argument. No new chargers were required by this move. All the old chargers continue to work just fine.

If you already have a USB A to Lightning cable you can keep using this, true. But the new cable that is included just does not fit. An android convert who might have a dozen USB A chargers but zero USB A to Lightning cables would either need such a cable, which is not in the box, or a new charger, which has a USB C socket on it to use the cable from the box.

In other words, you are admitting I'm entirely correct. No new chargers are required by this move.

You’re only kind of correct. If my new phone ships with a brand new cable I’m going to want to use it — cables age, and my newest cable (especially one from a reputable manufacturer) is going to get used. But if I don’t have a USB-C brick then suddenly I need to buy one to use my best cable.

Also, another way to spin this would be that they managed to keep their prices constant (1) in a year with inflation by not forcing you to pay for stuff you do not need.

Either way, it’s spin. As with many luxury products, their product prices correlate only loosely with costs. Certainly, the last two digits are psychological.

(1) since products change and currency exchange rates fluctuate, I think that’s almost impossible to prove, but also to disprove.

The opposite is true here (android household). We don't buy phones very often so we have exactly 2 USB-C chargers in the household so I was kinda happy that work gave me a (now 3rd party) charger for my work iphone. I have retrofitted all my cables with a couple small micro-usb-to-usb-c adapters but especially when you don't change phones often, you should exactly NOT be drowning in chargers. In the Micro-USB times I actually bought 2-3 extra ones because we never had enough... I'm all for finally only having USB-C chargers in the future, but I wouldn't call this transition exactly smooth.

> ...when you don't change phones often, you should exactly NOT be drowning in chargers.

Right, and the way to achieve that is to sell the charger separately. Just with 3 phones each x 2 people over 11 years (replacing phones every 4 years-ish) and that's already 6 chargers. Throw in a single iPad and a work phone and I'm up to 8. Add in one third-party charger with two ports and a power strip with a built-in charger, and now we're up to 10.

I don't know how often "often" is but I don't feel like getting a new phone after 4 years is much of a hurry.

Yeah but only if they're not changing them every few years - and we thought Micro USB would last for a while.

one charger in my home office, two in the bedroom, one in the living room, one per office building - that's 6 of them already accounted for, no spares.

I like the idea of unbundling them, but in the end I keep buying additional ones anyway...

The chargers I have are all separate from the cables. Both Apple and Android.

The actual cost of the charger isn’t as important as:

> The removal of these accessories also means smaller packaging for the iPhones, thus contributing to the growing profit for the company.

And I wish the article expanded on this. Shipping maybe 2x the amount of iPhones via the same cargo plane is cheaper and contributes way more to reducing environmental impact than not needing to create the 5W charger.

> Shipping maybe 2x the amount of iPhones via the same cargo plane is cheaper and contributes way more to reducing environmental impact than not needing to create the 5W charger.

How much space of that cargo plane/ship is taken by chargers in separate(!) packaging, because people had to order both separately? Even if people do not buy Apple-made chargers, they'll buy a 3rd party company charger. What's the impact of transporting those?

Most people who buy iPhones already have multiple working chargers.

Usually when you sell your old phone you give away your old charger.

All the people around me only have one crappy old cables whose housing start to separate from the usb connector from years of use. I tend to be the exception in the sense that I am the clumsy one of the group who keeps dropping, losing or breaking his phones and have bought other devices that requires usb-c cables.

> Shipping maybe 2x the amount of iPhones via the same cargo plane is cheaper and contributes way more to reducing environmental impact than not needing to create the 5W charger.

Is there an impartial source for this claim or are you parroting Apple's marketing and PR?

Here's one source on why you and Apple (and Samsung) are wrong about this[1]. Spoiler alert, it's all for the money and doesn't save the environment. Pure hypocrisy from all of them. If they really cared bout the environment they had so many other things they could improve.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVPM6D-3aZo

To be fair, linking to another soapbox without its own hard analysis or sources isn't much more of a source than my own claim (below) or your claim. But I also can't find much of a source on this matter outside of articles talking about Apple's or Samsung's claims.

If you have 10,000 iPhones on a cargo ship that previously could only have 5,000, you've cut out a whole shipment. Whether or not this is realistically how it works is not too important (since whenever I buy it, I get tracking all the way from China and it shows China->Alaska->US, so it's likely on a plane) but let's assume this is a shipment 5 months in and they've downgraded to cargo ships.

Now imagine that, out of those iPhones, half of the people buying them don't have a USB-C brick and don't have any existing USB-A bricks+USB-A charging cables lying around, aka any new customer coming from a USB-A Android.

Indeed this might mean a lot more packaging like your video says, but these are people that already know for a fact that they need the new USB-C charging brick to charge their phone. For the other half of people that already have a wall charger, this new 5W charger that would have came in the box would have been thrown in a drawer somewhere, maybe never getting used since they already have chargers for where they need them, which is arguably more of a waste of rare earth metals than the packaging that the new charger comes in.

>Shipping maybe 2x the amount of iPhones via the same cargo plane is cheaper

Before the charger removal iPhone flight was already reaching max takeoff weight. So you dont gain 2x the iPhone just because you have more space. The charger is less than 30g, so Apple gained may be 10 -15% savings in flight cost and carbon reduction.

They actually saved a lot more in the BOM cost. Comparatively speaking it is getting very hard to squeeze another $1-$2 on the iPhone already. From Apple's stand point, they would much rather these $2 to be used elsewhere, such as better speaker, or bigger battery etc.

This depends on if Apple was actually constrained by the weight of the flight or if they were constrained by the available space of the bays on the UPS plane[0]. I can’t really find a weight measurement of the iPhone X box, though (and I assume the boxes are shipped to the US packed together, and some inventory center in the US places them in the final protected packaging).

https://www.aircargo.ups.com/en-US/aircraft

>This depends on if Apple was actually constrained by the weight of the flight.....

>Before the charger removal iPhone flight was already reaching max takeoff weight.

Well, that's what i'm questioning - was it actually reaching max takeoff weight? Given the size of these cargo planes, if the one with the most capacity (which is likely for fulfilling launch week Apple shipments) were filled entirely with iPhones corner to corner within the available bays of the aircraft, would it really reach max weight?

> Both the earphones and chargers retail for $19 USD each and since these items are usually cheaper to produce, Apple is saving approximately $35 USD per device.

I'm curious as to where this $35 USD figure came from. I'd be very surprised if headphones/chargers only had a ~8% margin.

I'd (perhaps naively) guess that at Apple's scale, we'd be talking low single digits for wired headphones/chargers.

Generic 20W USB-C chargers retail at about $8-$15 on Amazon. Apple's are probably better designed than the lowest grade of chargers, but on the other hand we have to subtract the profit margins of seller and Amazon and account for Apple's scale, so $8 sounds like a reasonable first estimate for what it costs Apple to make them. And I can't imagine the earphones costing more than $5 to make.

Apple's chargers are a lot better engineered than the cheap ones on Amazon. Ken Shiriff did a teardown of one.[0] However, he does point out the "Apple Tax" their chargers have:

> Samsung sells a very similar cube charger for about $6-$10, which I also disassembled (and will write up details later). The Apple charger is higher quality and I estimate has about a dollar's worth of additional components inside. But it sells for $20 more.

[0]: https://www.righto.com/2012/05/apple-iphone-charger-teardown...

Except for the 11 Pro Max which came with an 18W charger, Apple only shipped 5W chargers they made themselves, so the COGS at that scale must have been extremely low, i'd have to imagine under $5 for that.

> It's all a part of my "Green Intitiative". And by green, I mean money.

-- Dwight Shrute

I feel like manufacturers should be responsible for the full life cycle of what they create. You should be able to send your device back to the manufacturer for reuse/recycling and they should be required to have processes in place to handle this responsibly. The amount of e-waste generated by Apple alone is staggering while they walk away with mind blowing profits.

In the EU the WEEE directives put the responsibility for recycling on the producers, although mostly this ends up being via third parties but many companies and retailers will allow you to turn in old goods, they're just quite quiet about it.

The rapid turnover of new products is widespread throughout our consumer based societies, not an Apple issue alone, and arguably their decision to not include accessories like a power brick reduces electrical waste as most people have one already. The extra packaging from these accessories is typically cardboard and trivial in comparison to producing unneeded small electronics.

article is poorly sourced and uses retail price to calculate savings which is silly

Furthermore reducing waste inherently saves money. Talk about no good deed going unpunished

How is this a "good deed", could you explain your thought process?

If you buy a laptop and the manufacturer says they aren't providing the power brick, would you be okay with it? What about a juicer or blender without power chord? If I sold you a bike without seat (and sell it separately), is that a "good deed" in your opinion?

A case can be extra. Engravings on a phone can be extra. Stickers can be extra. These aren't necessary to use a phone, a power brick isn't the same as these.

You know what they can do to help the environment? Have more ports in their computers, so users don't have to buy more dongles. Make their products easily repairable, so users can keep them longer. Oh no, that would hurt their profits. So "courage" it is, for removing headphone jacks...

If you already have a cord, an additional one is redundant and unnecessary, needlessly increasing weight and waste as well as cost to move it. If you don’t then you buy it.

And yes I’d buy a laptop without a power cord if I happened to already have the same one - at worst I’d buy the one I need.

"Apple has also promised that by 2023, its supply chain and product usage will become entirely carbon neutral."

What does this mean exactly? It seems absurd to think that everything that apple does is in any way carbon neutral or neutral whatsoever with respect to the environment. As far as I can tell, Apple has much higher standards than most, but this seems dishonest.

I imagine it means that they will buy carbon credits or the like. They certainly can't actually make a carbon neutral iPhone but they can pay to pull carbon out of the air or something. It definetely is kind of marketing speak though.

Probably that their suppliers all receive some kind of carbon neutral certification (probably given out by Apple themselves rather than an impartial third party).

If you consider all of the Apple hardware that gets thrown out because Apple doesn’t allow them to be repaired, a “carbon neutral supply chain” just seems like a sinister distraction.

For our company that means that we are pumping money into Chinese wind park building projects.

Nothing changes here at the production plant, but on the other side of the earth, somebody is building a wind turbine. That's how you get "carbon neutral" these days.

Apple has published a pretty detailed report on their plans and accomplishments. I also think the article is quoting Apple’s commitments wrong as their full supply chain carbon neutrality commitment is 2030 I think.

https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/Apple_Environmental_Pr...

"Cut down on waste" was clearly not the primary motivator.

Which is the primary and which is the secondary is hard to be sure about, but it’s not unreasonable to assume both played a part — Apple is not short of profit and visibly actions a lot more charitable causes than many other megacorps, and yet one can also cynically say the causes it puts visible support into are merely part of its branding, just like one can argue that all altruism in the humans and other animals is merely genetic self promotion.

A company who cared about waste wouldn't make planned obsolescence such a big part of their business model.

How is supporting 6+ year old devices planned obsolescence? iOS 15 supports[0] devices as old as the iPhone 6s (released September 2015), the iPad Air 2 (October 2014), iPad mini 4th gen (September 2015), and the 1st gen iPad Pro (November 2015).

Could Apple do better about opening up the devices (especially after support ends)? Sure. But they're doing a hell of a lot better than Android manufacturers where "two years of updates" is a marketing bullet point. A $1000 Samsung S20 (released March 2020) will only get Android 10, 11, and 12.[1]

[0]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe... and https://3nions.com/list-of-ios-15-supported-devices/

[1]: https://9to5google.com/2020/03/03/samsung-galaxy-s20-android...

But what can’t be argued against in good faith is that the planet would be better off if Apple ceased all manufacturing operations. Painting them as anything other than an eco-villain is simply dishonest.

There are other manufacturers out there destroying the planet, but Apple is without a doubt one of the worst, and not just because of their massive scale. They seem to be on a mission to create as much e-waste as possible, making their devices difficult to repair and using their lawyers to make it even harder.

> But what can’t be argued against in good faith is that the planet would be better off if Apple ceased all manufacturing operations.

Hmm… I mean, if they stopped making stuff themselves they’d be outsourcing more, but assuming you mean they don’t cause anything to be built even in their name, sure.

> Painting them as anything other than an eco-villain is simply dishonest.

Regular reports about how much they’re reducing emissions in their entire supply chain, that they themselves are already carbon neutral in the US, and are on a path to get the supply chain and product life cycle carbon neutral by 2030?

Sure, they’re not perfect, but a villain? Nope.

> They seem to be on a mission to create as much e-waste as possible

Funny way of doing that, by removing redundant stuff from their sales.

I’d certainly like it if their stuff was easier to repair — my first-gen Apple Watch only died last year and could’ve been saved if the screen hadn’t cracked when the battery expanded, and my MacBook Air from mid-2013 is still working but could use a new keyboard and battery and one new USB port and the power cable is a disaster — but 8 years is a fantastic duration compared to any tech I’ve ever used, possibly excluding the things my family bought before I was aware: a Commodore 64, a Video 2000 cassette recorder, a landline telephone, and a cathode ray TV (but even then some of the buttons fell off).

Profit is the primary motivator for pretty much any business decision, either directly or indirectly (e.g. the PR of corporate giving). The best we can ever hope for is beneficial secondary effects.

Just a thought about the environmental part: I wonder how much more energy is being spent using generic or older (and inefficient) chargers DAILY, instead of shipping more efficient and faster chargers in the box....

But it was for the environmenttttt

Can’t wait for the EU to mandate customer replaceable batteries. Apple can put their designers to good use for a few generations.

Personally, I have no issue with this, although I can easily see how someone else may. I have so many desk drawers full of random iPhone/iPod/iPad chargers that it got to the point I was just beginning to leave new ones in the box and/or just throw them away.

What Apple should do was give the option to the consumer. If you choose to not include a charger then you receive a small credit.

> Both the earphones and chargers retail for $19 USD each and since these items are usually cheaper to produce, Apple is saving approximately $35 USD per device.

I find the wording in this sentence confusing. Is this saying Apple's cost to produce one pair of headphones and one charger is $35?

That seems on the high side. I would assume Apple's markup on an item they sell for $19 to be much higher.

Semi-humorously, if Apple No Longer Provided Anything At All, I wonder if it would make a lot more money? Sell off all the real estate, industrial assets, IP, staff down to a modest investment bank size, and be like Norway's sovereign fund. I suppose it already leverages its cash hoard to do such things, among other things.

I got a 2020 SE. I charge it with the same charger I use for my ipad. I don't like earbuds, so not getting them wasn't a problem. I already have a bunch of spare doodads from other devices, not getting more seems like a good move.

Remember when things like Televisions, VCRs, and DVD players didn't come with cables? There'd be a rack of overpriced AV cables nearby, though.

Its a good business and extracts a lot of profit out of convenience.

Of course they did. That was their plan.

Also, if you bought that "environmental" BS they were spewing when they said they'd no longer include charging bricks, you were played, sorry to say.

I think that given the reduction in waste, reduction in needless use of planetary resources, reduced pollution, etc, this is ok.

It certainly drove the sale of airpods according to some analysts. The number is probably higher

This fits perfectly into the "Less is more" philosophy. :D

I wish we had a good alternative to iPhones.

Utter genius.

cant wait for apple to die

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