There was a (wonderful) time when when you bought an iPhone, Apple not only included the cable and charger, but also included EarPods headphones. In 2020 the iPhone 12 arrived and They broke that tradition: that box It included the phone and the charging cable, but nothing else.
All manufacturers released following that trail with the same speech from Apple: at that point, users they used to tell with their own headphones and some charger, so what they were doing was protect the environment although that argument was not particularly convincing.
Of course, they did something else: first They saved money by not including those elementsand then they earned it when you bought them official headphones and adapters if you ended up needing them.
Of course one could resort to third-party accessories, although Lumafield CT scans have been demonstrating for some time that cables, chargers and headphones from companies like Apple are expensive because they are small works of art of engineering. In fact, those same images reveal that the same you shouldn’t trust of “strange” cables, lest they be tools to hack your computers.
The truth is that Apple’s decision – which other companies such as Fairphone had previously made – made a deep impact on the industryand nowadays it is very rare to find a mobile phone whose box includes a charger, much less headphones.
But the thing is can go further. USB charging cables may also be about to disappear from those boxes.
Do we really need the USB cable to be included with our devices?
A Reddit user revealed recently how when buying his Sony Xperia 10 VII he had found a surprise: in the box There was no charger, but there was no charging cable either.. In the photo included in the post it was clearly seen how this absence was made evident on the back of the box.
The Sony Xperia 10 VII does not include a charger or charging cable.
It is true that Sony is no longer a major player in the field of mobility, but these types of decisions are what can begin to establish an important precedent that other manufacturers end up adopting as well.
At Xataka we have contacted those responsible for Sony to try to find out the reasons behind that decision. In the absence of confirmation, it seems clear that the environmental protection and the reduction of electronic waste may once again be the clear argument, although obviously the savings for Sony may also be relevant.
The European Union precisely wanted mitigate the problem of electronic waste years ago. He did it at set the USB-C connector as the standard connector to charge mobile devices, something that for example forced Apple to ditch your Lightning connector.
In these years it seems clear that users We have ended up accumulating a good number of USB-C cables to charge our devices. It is something similar to what happened with chargers: a priori we all have one at home, so the need to include them in the box, as is now the case with cables, is debatable.
Of course, it also happens that over time mobile phones tend to allow charging at higher power or transferring data at higher speeds, and this makes it necessary to use chargers and cables specially prepared to take advantage of these options.
But even in those cases, including the charger or cable doesn’t seem to make much sense. Especially because Those accessories that manufacturers include are the “basic” models that allow you to upload or transfer data, but not at maximum speed. The usual thing here for years is that manufacturers offer that option on the mobile, but we have to buy the specific charger and cable separately, which imposes an extra cost.
Will we therefore see fewer and fewer USB cables included in mobile phone boxes? It seems quite possible. Now all that’s left is for the manufacturers of those USB-C cables to solve their big problem: label them well so that we know which one to use at all times.
Image | Zana Latif
In Xataka | The USB-C standard promised to solve the connector chaos. The situation is worse than ever
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