Last updated on 2021/09/26
The rumor mill churned out another doozie this week as it came out that the Pixel 6 is not going to come supplied with a charger.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone.
As soon as Apple led the way, Samsung soon followed and it only made sense for Google to fall in line.
There are a couple of reasons from a sales standpoint to do this.
First – it saves money.
How much is very debatable, but the types of chargers supplied with phone purchases probably run somewhere on the order of $2-$10 in bulk quantities.
How do I know this? Having led product engineering teams for quite some time including building many electrical devices, you get a sense of how hard to make and costly most products really are.
The real secret in product manufacturing is in buying and building in bulk. Order 250 of something? Decent pricing. Order 250,000? Excellent bare-bones pricing.
It is no secret that Best Buy for a long time has made no money on televisions. They are typically sold at cost, with them recouping lots of profit on “gold plated super duper crystalline diode baby tear washed HDMI cables.”
Apple routinely sells chargers or $40 or more for their phones. They are nice chargers, but more of a way to make some extra money than actually costing that more than other chargers.
Second – chargers are becoming universal. We should all celebrate this fact.
Apple is still clinging on to their lightning connector, but those days are possibly numbered.
Another news tidbit that came out this week is that the European Commission is going to start putting pressure on device manufacturers to standardize phone chargers.
This would be awesome if it turned into reality. Having common charging connectors and input voltages would be as awesome as, I don’t know, being able to use the same electric plug in every outlet around the world.
Going on trips with friends there are always people missing out on charging their phones as we have a solid mix of android and iPhones in our group.
Having one charger to rule them all would be a very nice thing indeed.
However, there is one very annoying factor that companies keep using as an excuse to drop chargers from the phone boxes.
This is an incredibly annoying and altogether ridiculous statement that at face value may seem to be altruistic but just feels slimy in practice.
Google is the latest company stating that they want to help the environment and reduce e-waste by supplying chargers that people are just going to throw away because they already have chargers from previous phones.
This is ridiculous and asinine.
Anyone that has lived with teenagers and their constant ability to lose things (like phone chargers) knows that having an extra unit readily available can be a godsend.
Additionally, even with being able to use previous wall warts, a lot of us will be able to plug into different places and leave those there for use as needed.
Need one at the office? You used to be able to get a new one when buying a new phone. Want one by your bed? How about your travel suitcase?
I am mostly ok with companies choosing to not provide chargers, probably because I have what I need now as the Pixel 6 is still using USB-C so it won’t affect me personally.
Also, the corporate greed factor is what it is and doesn’t bother me that much. These cost-cutting measures happen all the time. We are lucky that we made it this long getting shiny new charges in every box.
Maybe it is just a sad state of affairs that changes like these don’t elicit either surprise or the indignant response that they should.
However, having to order a new charger that is smaller than a box of playing cards and having a UPS van drive its gas-guzzling way 20 miles one way to my house only to drop off a box from Amazon large enough to hold 178 of these things with a ton of inflated plastic waste just so I can charge my new phone isn’t any kind of environmental savings.
If corporations wanted to embrace saving the environment, they would design phones that would last more than a year or two. Or make phones that allow for the easy swapping of key components like the battery. That way we could all use our phones for longer and, you know, maybe help the environment?
Pretty soon we will all have to embrace being technological grandparents, reliving the glory days when new phones included chargers, earbuds, and all phones had a dedicated headphone jack.
Of course, as time grows, we will have to embellish these stories so that charging the phones involved carrying them uphill, in the snow, to plug them into non-standard electrical outlets.
No matter what stories we tell in the future, hopefully, they can move away from shady marketing gimmicks from companies trying to tell us they are helping the environment just to save a few dollars on a new phone.
Thanks for reading!
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