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.
I'd be surprised if even half bought a new charger, most people who needed one probably just got a cheap one from Amazon.
Edit: Yes, there's decent, branded, 3rd party chargers too. Just commenting on the really cheap 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.