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's happened with smartphones recently apple samsung xiaomi and i've got no doubt plenty of others very soon have decided to no longer give you a charger in the box and every single one of these companies has said we're doing this to protect the environment but this got me thinking is 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 look at samsung's new galaxy s21 ultra box compared to last year's s20 ultrabox and think wow samsung you're so eco-conscious it's half the size what heroes but not everything does 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 one 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 two 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 reasonable chance that something's going to go wrong with either the brick or the cable that's specifically made to fit that brick and so you might end up buying a new one anyways 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 you use 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 its 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 charges getting removed we've also silently lost the earphones we used to get now if this s21 ultra had a headphone jack then fine fair enough i think 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 usbc 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 completely different price bracket and so the solution for a lot of people is going to 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 can 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 this is now pretty much one of your best options not only do i now have a worse earphone experience than i would have had before i'm not getting that special akg tuned sound that i used to get but more importantly i've probably used three times as much packaging than if that stuff was just included in the original box and jordan are the worst part of this that 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 do you think if i told people that subscribing to my channel was eco-friendly they would do it i don't know but what i do think is that 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 four sets of packaging four 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 one it is not the best move for the planet more on that in a minute but also to 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 me 10 t you can count on us now if these companies they genuinely believed 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 happened 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've never said their 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 two how they're the same company who for almost 10 years have insisted on using their own lightning ports instead of the usbc 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 onwards 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 or 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 tech 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 actually 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 do think is disingenuous about this this whole no charger situation is that the way it's 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 they're saving the planet but all that's really happening is that 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 to 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 charges 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 every time you charge your phone using it it's actually wasting less energy gallium nitride charges are up to 25 percent 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 charges that 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 these kinds of charges 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 me 11 which they literally announced two days after i filmed the rest of this video 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 watching my name is aaron this is mr who's the boss and i'll catch you in the next one you

Channel: Mrwhosetheboss

Views: 4,876,858

Rating: 4.9418731 out of 5

Keywords: apple, iphone, iphone 12, samsung, samsung galaxy, samsung s21, s21 ultra, samsung no charger, iphone no charger, no charger, charger, charger in box, box, free charger, environment, tech, android, smartphones

Id: WVPM6D-3aZo

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/r_is_not_my_letter]

tech companies only want one thing, and it's disgusting

[u/ladykaya10]

I love how he presents both sides. I hope the tech companies think of doing better partnering with others so that you can create a one ship method of phone, charger, headphones, and case. All in one box with digital manual on the phone. Sounds good, but again, what's their bottom line.

[u/rammstein-nebun]

One thing he didn't stressed: the real reason for Apple ditching the charger is not reducing the carbon footprint but MAKING MORE MONEY! And this is called hypocrisy.

[u/silverfang789]

Seems like the future is buttonless, portless phones that rely entirely on wireless to connect them to anything. That might be fine most of the time, but how would you connect the phone to a PC for diagnostic purposes? Lemme guess. You're supposed to just buy a new phone!

[u/Vigilante678]

If S21 came with a headphone jack, charger in the box, it would have made Samsung more profit with new customers coming in, more than it would have costed for them to add those.

[u/usernameistaken89]

Sad truth that his opinion won't change the reality. Everyone gonna still buy that freaking phone and nothing gonna change as long as most of you buy this.

[u/charmanashley]

I can see why Apple are going this route, their chargers provided in the box with the iPhones have always been a joke, but for Samsung to mock Apple, then copy Apple, that's just stupid. I don't know why every company wants to be like Apple or follow their trends, I for one like companies like Samsung, cause they're not Apple, and don't make the majority of the stupid decisions and choices that Apple make.

[u/hendog4385]

The problem is when Apple removes features and sells a lot of phones, it give others manufacturers the license to do the same, but the what they fail to realize is that most Apple users feel like they have no other choice but to use Apple products. Thus resulting constant turnover in profits. There are still companies that still offer things like a headphone jack and chargers and barely anyone even noticed. So companies see it as a non essential component of the smartphone experience so they get rid of it.

[u/jaredkoh]

And yet S21 boasts one of the highest pre-order rates ever, higher than S20. I was so hoping S21 would flunk to send Samsung a message but alas the average consumer is so ignorant.