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After charger, Apple removes USB-C cable from the box
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this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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It's fine if they reduce the price accordingly.
If it's still the same price after they take the cable out, it was never about reducing waste to begin with.
Knowing Apple, that wouldn't surprise me in the slightest, which is why I never have and never will own any of their products.
Adjusted for inflation, last years 15 was $827.
The base 16 is $800 and a separate USB C cable from Apple is about $20 for 1m and $30 for 2m.
So, if you buy a phone and cable, you’re spending about as much as you did last year, adjusting for inflation.
I don’t know why I just wasted all that time calculating that. I need to get a life.
But here's the question: does it cost Apple $20 to make a cable? I seriously doubt it. It probably costs them closer to 20 cents per cable. So in reality, they now make approximately $20 more from every sale than they did before.
Sure, not everyone is buying a cable with every phone. But cables get lost, they wear out, they get stolen by your kids to charge their iPhones because they broke theirs, they get chewed up by pets, etc.
And you can bet your ass that, just like any other high-margin item, the people in the Apple store are gonna be incentivized like hell to get every customer to buy a cable with their phone whether they really need it or not:
How do they make $20 more if the price is reduced by $27 from last year and the cable taken out? At most they make the $3 more if people buy the 2m cable. For the 1m cable they make less than last year.
The phone plus cable last year adjusted to inflation is $827 and this year it's $820. The cost of the cable for Apple is not in play here.
The point is kind of moot because the phone definitely comes with the cable: https://www.apple.com/iphone-16/specs/
The article is actually about the new AirPods. I was going entirely off the information in the comment I was replying to.
The thing is, the iPhone 14, 15 and 16 all have the same launch price: $799 US
Adjusted for inflation, the 14 and 15 may have cost more, but Apple is almost certainly making that money back somewhere else. Like, say, making people pay for accessories that used to be included?
And at the end of the day, the prices consumers pay for end products don't follow the exact same curve as the prices megacorporations pay for materials and labor. We've seen plenty of evidence that the current inflation is almost entirely driven by companies price gouging consumers. So it's not really reasonable to assume that Apple's costs have gone up 1:1 with consumer prices anyway.
And actually, the fact that the price hasn't increased is pretty obvious evidence of this.
Do you think, for one second, Apple would accept any appreciable hit to its profit margin if their costs had inflated 1:1 with consumer prices? Especially when they have a perfect excuse to blame a price increase on?
The phone may cost them a little more to make than last year, but I doubt it's that much.
There's tons of elasticity built into the pricing already so that carriers can offer discounts.
The removed the cable from the box of the AirPods 4, not iPhone.
well..by selling both the cable and wall adapter as separate items it doubles the packaging by necessity so it was still never about reducing waste
✊👍
I’m not going to defend Apple’s profit maximization strategy here, but I disagree. Most people won’t end up buying a cable and adaptare because they already have one, and in contrast to those pieces made of plastic and metal, the packaging is mostly made of paper. I’m pretty confident that the reduction in plastic and metal makes up for the extra packaging that’s produced for the minority that does buy a cable and/or adapter.
Seriously, since Apple stopped including a wall brick I have not had a single-port power adapter in my household. All I have now are a few power adapters with multiple USB A and C outputs so I can charge whatever is needed.
I agreed when they removed the brick. Everyone was saying it was horrible and it wasn’t actually about reducing waste but, nobody needs a new brick. If you reeeaaally need one, it’s really not going to break the bank to buy one, and it does massively reduce waste to not include one with every single new phone. I don’t see why people support wasting all these resources that 95% of the time is just going to be e-waste.
I don't care if they keep the extra couple cents they saved on not giving the cable. I fucking hate getting extra e-junk with my electronics. I hate getting new cables just like I fucking hated getting shitty headsets with pre-smart phones. Nobody used them regardless. For all I care all battery-powered electronics, including laptops, could very well come without chargers and standardised cables, just with large warning on the box (like the one on cigarette packs). That was the fucking point of this EU regulation, to reduce e-junk
The worst to me is everyone now including a shitty bag to put the product in. Like it MAYBE makes sense to include a case for travel headphones or something but no I do not need you to include something for me to put the external SSD drive in.
My Nintendo 3ds came without a charger nor cable, and it blew my mind at that time 😆 but to be fair, the 3ds does not exactly have a standard port, even if it is designed to charge using 5v 500mA.
I ended up buying a third party 3ds to USB-A cable…