Once upon a time there were the chargers included in the packaging of smartphones and maybe there won’t be anymore. After the news that Apple, starting from the iPhone 12, could remove the charger from the standard equipment, now comes the similar news of a farewell to the chargers in the packages of Samsung.
The news comes from Korean sources and has no official confirmation (as well as the one about Apple). Samsung is said to be considering this, but has not yet made a final decision. The removal of the charger from the box, then, could affect only the top of the range smartphones and not even the low-end budget ones. Generally speaking, buying a smartphone without a charger could have more pros than cons for the end customer, but this decision by two top manufacturers like Apple and Samsung could be hiding something else. Something much less pleasant for the user.
Smartphone without charger: is it worth it?
The reason why Apple and Samsung are thinking about removing the charger from the packaging of their top of the range products is simple: these accessories cost a lot of money, even to the manufacturer, and anything that can be removed would be a saving. For the seller and the buyer.
After all today everybody has at least one charger in their home, inherited from a previous smartphone, and so they are able to charge a new smartphone even if they can’t find the charger inside the box. There would also be an environmental benefit, as accumulating chargers in drawers only creates future WEEE to be disposed of. The real issue is the charging power.
Fast charging: what to expect
If we have a charger in our drawer it is because it is from an old smartphone. Surely that charger will still work, but it will be slow because it will have a low power output. The new top of the range smartphones have fast charging as one of their key features and this means that if I buy an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy today with fast charging and there is no charger in the box, then I will have to spend more money if I want to use fast charging. This means that in order to use 100% of the features I have already paid for, then I have to pay again.
But not only that, because this could be just the first phase of a long-term reasoning that will lead manufacturers to make fast chargers “proprietary”: if charger and smartphone talk to each other, and they can do it either via USB-C or Lightning or even via a trivial Rfid tag, then a smartphone manufacturer can force us to use only its chargers if we want fast charging. Perhaps citing security reasons. And all this could happen in the Android world as well.