The REAL reason you don’t get a charger anymore.

You know, it's always a bit suspicious when someone takes something away from you, but then they try to convince you that it's for your own benefit. Well, that's exactly what happened with smartphones recently.

Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi. And i've got not doubt.

Plenty of others, very soon have decided to no longer give you a charger in the box, and very single one of these companies has said: "We're doing this to protect the environment".

But this got me thinking, it's not giving a charger actually better for the environment?.

Because, yes, on the face of it, of course, if everything else stayed the same then shipping a phone without a charger means you can use a smaller box and it also means, one less plastic brick that might one day end up in a landfill site. And with this logic you could at Samsung's new Galaxy S21 Ultra box compared to last year's S20 Ultra box and think: "Wow, Samsung, you're so eco-conscious. It's half the size, what heroes". But, not everything stay the same.

As soon as a company decides that they're not going to send a charger with their phone, it creates KNOCK-ON EFFECTS, like just for starters, i think it's going to mean a lot of people will end up buying their own. Think about it:

1. If you just use your old charger, you're not getting the charging speed that you're paying for. I mean, to be honest, if you're using a three-year-old brick, you're probably not even getting half of the charging speed that your phone is capable of.

2. Chargers don't last forever, like aside from the fact that people lose them, if you just carry on using a charger that you've already been using for three years for another three years, then there's at least a resonable chance that something's going to go wrong with either the brick or the cable that's specifically to fit that brick, and so, you might end up buying a new one anyways.

3. And the third thing that i haven't really seen anyone talk about is that this whole concept of not giving someone a new charger it rests on their ability to be able to use their old one, but i feel like the way it works in most households is when you buy a new phone, you sell or give away the old phone including the charger that came with it.

So, assuming that at some point within the three years or so that your new phone, you decide to buy a new charger for it, then straight away we have already used more packaging than the entire box of the last generation. Now, you might be looking at me thinking: "Well, don't be silly, this is tiny, but first of all, i've specifically picked this charger because it was the most compact packaging i could find.

But secondly, if you open it up, you realize that to send something like a charger on it's own, you need a lot of padding. So there's not just the cardboard outside, but a cardboard tray, a second layer of cardboard on the inside, not to mention a plastic anti-static bag. But, most significantly.......this:

We've got to factor in not just the packaging that comes with the charger, but just, all the extra environmental damage that comes with having a separate item that needs to be delivered, like, the fact that a van has to take one extra trip to come drop the item off with me, but also the fact that this means we have to have an entirely separate outer box that takes up even more room in that truck than the entire last phone's retail box.

But it doesn't end there, because in this whole frenzy of chargers getting removed, we've also silently lost the earphones we used to get. Now, if this S21 Ultra had an headphone jack, then fine, fair enough. I think that the headphone jack has been around long enough that it's fair to assume you have a pair, but this doesn't have the headphone jack. How many people do you think just randomly have a pair of USB-C specific earphones lying around, the ones they would actually need for this, five percent?, two percent?. I mean, sure, wireless earphones are booming right now, i could always go out and buy a pair of Galaxy Buds Pro, but, those are in a complete different price bracket, and so, the solution for a lot of people is gonna be: "Okay, i'm going to go on to amazon.com and i'm just going to buy the cheapest USB-C earphones that i could find". So, that is what i searched for and i did find a pair that had some nice compact packaging, but, it was out of stock, so really just to demonstrate my point, i ordered the normal headphone jack version of those same earphones, and this is what i got...

Let me be very clear, this, is how the last gen earphones were presented when they came in the box...

And that is now pretty much one of your best options, not only do i now have a worse earphone experience than i would have before, i'm not getting that special AKG tuned sound that i used to get, but more importantly, i've probabily used three times as much packaging than if that stuff was just included in the original box, and, do you wanna know the worst part of this....

This is what Amazon delivered these earphones to me in and inside of it, to pad the whole thing up, plastic. Like, yes, to be clear, Amazon does try to deliver in as few deliveries as possible, and they do try to have an outer box that roughly matches what comes inside of it, but, the very fact that Amazon handles so many different types of items means that, they can't possibly optimize the packaging as much as say...Samsung could, because, when Samsung sends out a phone, it's going to be the same size every single time, so they can come up with a system that means you use very little cardboard, if everything you need for your phone comes in one single package, then yes, that box is bigger and yes not everyone is going to use every single thing that comes inside of it, but just because of how snugly you can fit these bits together, because of how each piece no longer needs its own separate packaging, and because it can all be delivered in one trip, i'd still be willing to bet that on average, this is still better for the environment, kind of curious. And this is only the start of it, i reckon that within a year or two, a lot of companies are going to stop even including free cases for the same reasons, you're probably starting to get the picture, if they do that......4 sets of packaging, 4 separate delivery trips. Now, don't get me wrong, sustainability is good, we need to look after our planet, but what kind of makes this move in particular sting a little is the fact that:

1. It is not the best move for the planet, more about that in a minute

2. But also two, the contradiction, like, take Samsung within one day of Apple saying that they were no longer going to give a charger, Samsung came galloping out of the woodwork saying: "Apple, how could you? Don't worry guys, we got you, if you buy a Galaxy, you'll get a charger, - Team Samsung".

Xiaomi was basically the same: "Don't worry guys, we didn't leave anything out of the box of the Mi10T, you can count on us".

Now, if these companies, they genuinely belived what they were saying, and, they were preaching the fact that something that they're choosing to do is better than something someone else is choosing to do, then, it's not a good look when they start copying them literally on their next phone, i think the strategy behind this was, "Let's hope people react badly to not having a charger, let's hope everyone boycotts Apple, and if they do that, they'll come running to us".

But, as soon as these companies found out that the iPhone 12 sold fine, they were like: "Fine, looks like we can get away with it too, let's just delete our old post and pretend it never happend". Samsung actually did that, and so, from this perspective, you can kind of cut Apple a little bit of slack. Because, at the very least, they were being consistent. Apple has almost built a reputation for doing this kind of thing, just trimming what they deem as unnecessary courage, and Apple has never put a lot of weight on charges, that's been very evident from how far behind they were versus the competition, and they never said they phones were great because they came with charges and so, even though this was a controversial decision, it at least with Apple felt purposeful, but, Apple has a different issue, they say they're removing the charger to help the environment, but some of their other actions kind of seem to go in the opposite direction to that. Like, how the cable you get in the iPhone 12 box doesn't fit the old charger, so if you want to use the new cable, you've got to get a new charger. Or, how they're the same company who for almost 10 years have insisted on using their own lighting ports instead of the USB-C that the entire rest of the industry has moved towards, which has resulted in a whole load of Apple accessories that can't be used with Android and a whole load of Android accessories that we can't use with iPhones, and then, there's MagSafe, Apple is strongly promoting the fact that their new iPhones can charge wirelessly using the snap-on attachment and it's looking pretty likely that from the iPhone 13 onward, you might have to charge like this, because the phones may not even have physical ports at all.

Again, i'm sure Android phones will follow suit with this, but the point is that MagSafe and wireless charging in general flows in the opposite direction to eco-friendliness, because, not only do you have to buy MagSafe as a separate item with its own box but even that doesn't come with the charger, but you would need to get the right speeds from it that's sold as an extra to the extra and most importantly, wireless charging is inefficient, because you've got to pass power through three of four layers of material, you have to basically create an electromagnetic field just to get it across. And by transferring energy like this, a lot of it ends up as a byproduct heat. I was reading an article the other day from Eric on debugger.com and he found that he was using up 47% more energy to fully charge his phone using wireless technology, and when you think that you're charging your phone possibly every single day for potentially three years that you might use it that is going to add up big time, not to mention how we also found that some wireless chargers were sipping power whilst not even actually charging anything. So 24 hours a day energy is being wasted, now, to be fair to MagSafe, it is about as good as wireless charging gets. It has magnets in the system to mean that the coils can line up as efficiently as possible, but, compared to wired charging, it's still not very good.

So...what i'm trying to say here is that, yes, companies want to be green, but what we need to bear in mind is that, they only want to be green in so much as it makes them profit, and so, as long as people feel bad about the state of the planet and so they feel good about buying apparently eco-conscious products, i think we'll be seeing a lot of these kinds of decisions being made, and that's fine, this is how businesses work, but, what i think is disingenuous about this, this whole "no charger" situation is that the way is being sold to us is not factoring in all the Knock-on effects it creates, like, it's very easy for the company to say: "We've made our boxes this percent smaller and so we've reduced our carbon footprint by this much". But that's just the thing, they've reduced their carbon footprint, i'm sure that from a company perspective, this looks great on paper, it looks like saving the planet, but, all that's happening is that carbon footprint is being shifted to the consumer who now has to potentially go out and buy their own charger, potentially even their own earphones, all of which have their own set of deliveries and their own set of packaging, okay...so the only thing left to answer is, "Was there a better way of doing this?"....I think so...I think a much more eco-friendly approach to this would have been to instead of ditching the charger, to improve the charger, how? Better materials, we've already actually started seeing chargers based on Gallium Nitride, which because it's more efficient, can deliver the same output by using fewer materials and fitting into a smaller brick, so much smaller that you could realistically have a pretty powerful 30 watt charger that actually fits into one of these new slim boxes, and, i guess the most important aspect of Gallium Nitride is that everytime you charge your phone using it, it's actually wasting less energy. Gallium Nitride chargers are up 25% more energy efficient than just using a normal silicon charger that you might have lying around. Which means, it could be up to 70% more efficient than using the Wireless charger we are getting currently pushed. Not to mention the byproduct of these being more energy efficient, means that with a Gallium Nitride charger there is less heat generated and so they have a longer lifespan too. So, using this kind of chargers and actually working to make them even better is what i see as a sustainable future, now, to give Xiaomi a bit of credit, even though they did drop the charger for their China phones, for the international version of the Mi11 which they literally announced two days after i wrote the rest of this post, they are not just including a charger, but including a 55 watt gallium nitride charger, which is great, so even though this will probably be one of their last phones with a brick, at least it means that people will have this good quality brick now to use with all their future phones...

Okay, thank you so much for reading. My name is Alex, this is RorBG, and i'll catch you in the next one...

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