Why smarphones companies removed charger from box

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 mean you can use a smaller box.

It also means one less plastic brick that might one day end up in a landfill sit 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 you old charger you're not getting the charging speed that you're paying for i mean to be honest if you're using a 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 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 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 heir own lightning ports instead of the usbc that the entire rest of the industry has moved toward 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 allagain 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 ene by a product heat 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 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