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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Why? All of those old USB-A chargers and USB-A/Lightning cables will still charge the new iPhones perfectly well.

So will every iPad charger ever made, btw.

And every USB-C Mac charger ever made.

Honestly, it doesn't matter whether you or any particular observer wants to give credit for this reducing e-waste or being "eco-friendly". It's a plainly obvious fact that it will massively reduce e-waste and be a massive net positive on the eco-friendly front, in about 5 different ways. Those facts remain valid regardless of how one chooses to think about the ethical/moral/environmental cred or goodwill that Apple deserves for this move, or Apple's profit motives.

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Apple’s move and their explanation honestly feels about as genuine as hotels asking you to be eco friendly by hanging the door-tag to skip room cleaning. The difference is that hotels at least give you the option.

Isn't Apple giving you a new option here?

Before, you were forced to buy the bundled wall wart, now you have the option to keep using what you had or buy a charger if you need it?

They're still forcing a bundled cable, but it's a different cable you probably don't have many of?

But, just like with hotels, you’re still paying the same price.

Sure, Apple also might tend to get more money per iPhone customer now, but that doesn't invalidate the environmental argument.

Then don't get an iphone 12? People who are buying an iphone aren't doing it because of the included power brick.

There is the iphone SE 2, Pixel 4a etc...

If it's such a problem, buy a braided cable from Amazon and power brick. Cheaper cost, better quality and will last longer than any Apple charger.

The iPhone SE 2 no longer comes with the power brick.

If you have no power bricks at all then applause to you.

In any given room I can find at least 5 I think.

For 0.025% of the price of the phone or less, you can get a braided lightning cable and stop caring about this first world problem.

Some hotels give you a discount for the next stay.

The equivalent option would be to offer the charger by default, and allow eco conscious consumers to opt out. Making it opt-in for folks without a working charger would strike a nice balance, even if it’s not feasible.

It is opt-in for people without a working charger - they sell chargers, or you can buy one of the many third party ones.

> a massive net positive on the eco-friendly front

Isn't wireless charging a big step backwards with respect to power efficiency? With the millions of phones they sell and the fact that every one of them is charged daily, are the losses due to Apples new charging scheme insignificant?

I'd say the energy used to charge phones is inconsequential.

The iPhone 12 has a 11 Wh battery. Assume it's fully charged daily, that's 11Wh * 365 ~ 4kwh per year. It's about 50 cents of electricity to charge the phone for a year. It's imperceptible given other household electricity items.

If people are concerned about electricity usage, they should give away LED lightbulbs.

Pro tip - If you make under 39k and live in Massachusetts you can literally get free LED lightbulbs through Mass save! It's an awesome program. https://www.masssave.com/en/saving/income-based-offers

Wired chargers are 85%-90% efficient, Qi is somewhat between 75-85%. If you live in a country powered by green energy it shouldn’t be a concern :)

I'm going to guess that 15% missing on the wired is the brick itself. I'm not sure how 5% more losses can make my phone heat up quite hot and also charge very slow. Are you sure it isn't 15% lost at the brick powering the wireless charger and then another 20-25% on the charging pad itself?

So wireless results in about 10% efficiency loss? So if half of the iPhone 12 users adopt wireless charging that's about 36 billion charge cycles per year (100 million phones charged daily). Those are big numbers. It seems like it would add up.

They do add up, but not to very much compared to virtually any other household use of electricity...

Since the waste product is heat, and if you live in a place where you need heating most of the year it's simply shifting heat generation from your heater to your phone.

In some places where heating is still done with natural gas you might even be more eco-friendly by having an inefficient charger.

Sure, there might be some niche corner case where it actually pencils out better. But that's not really helpful when assessing the impact of this on a global scale. There's some other scenario that's the opposite that cancels the benefit out.

And as far as heating is concerned, heat pumps are more efficient, and most electricity—when turned into resistive heat—is less efficient than burning the fuel directly.

So the only case where it would be a benefit is if your heat is fuel-based, but your power is renewable, and this condition lasts most of the year.

If a MagSafe charger can charge at 15W using a 20W Apple charger, that's a 75 percent charge efficiency. The charger itself is about 80 percent efficient converting from the wall, so the whole thing is about 60 percent efficient. An iPhone 12 has a 15 wh battery, so you need about 25 wh to charge the battery fully vs 19 wh. So the losses for 17,000 full charges using MagSafe over a regular cable would equal the charge in a 100kwh Tesla Model S.

ETA: the total charging loss from ten million iPhones charging 0-100 percent via MagSafe every day for a year would be 21,505 teslas.

Your numbers are a bit high, wired chargers have become more efficient and barely waste any energy, see here: (14wh spent to charge a 13wh battery) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309917872_Improving...

The last bit is also wrong, 6wh * 10M = 600 Teslas. You can also read as “600 Teslas can provide phone charging for ten million people for an entire year”, take it as you wish...

Your fridge can easily use 100kWh a month. You’ll save far more energy by closing the door a couple seconds early every time you open it. Phone charging is a drop in the bucket.

Sure.

But it's not the optimal experience.

For me it's an optimal experience: my device cost went down, I get to choose what I spend that money on (such as superior 3rd-party chargers with multiple ports), and I get the satisfaction of knowing that Apple didn't waste planetary resources making inflexible single-port chargers and $5 wired earbuds that I will never, ever use.

I do admit that it's not optimal for every single user, but I do think it's a net improvement for most users.

> my device cost went down

This seems to be a common narrative, that the savings have been passed onto the consumer. Is it really true? It's difficult to be sure, as there's no iPhone 12 that comes with the plug + earbuds bundled. However, there is one data point that most people don't bother to consider.

The iPhone SE (2020) base model launched at $399 in April. It still retails for $399 today.

In April, the iPhone SE shipped with headphones and a plug.[0] It doesn't anymore today.[1]

In the case of the iPhone SE, the price absolutely did not go down. All that happened was that Apple increased their profit margins.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20200427193132/https://www.apple...

[1] As part of our efforts to reach our environmental goals, iPhone SE does not include a power adapter or EarPods. Included in the box is a USB‑C to Lightning cable that supports fast charging and is compatible with USB‑C power adapters and computer ports. https://web.archive.org/web/20201023201007/https://www.apple...

I wasn't aware of the change to the SE 2020, but for 12s, storage is doubled across the line (or price dropped $100, depending how you look at it).

In a sufficiently complex product/company there is absolutely no way to work where costs went. Yes the SE without a doubt just become worse value but we have no way of knowing where the money went. Likely it didn't just vanish in to a wormhole but it instead will be invested in to R&D giving a better value for money product in the future.

The only thing consumers need to think about is "Does this product provide enough value to me for its cost". For me personally a charging brick and earpods provides no value since I would just leave them in the box.

>In a sufficiently complex product/company there is absolutely no way to work where costs went. Yes the SE without a doubt just become worse value but we have no way of knowing where the money went. Likely it didn't just vanish in to a wormhole but it instead will be invested in to R&D giving a better value for money product in the future.

I'm not sure whether this is satire or an sincere attempt at arguing that price hikes are good for consumers.

I'm just saying it doesn't matter how the internal economics of the company work. Look at the end product and think "Is this providing enough value for its price". Trying to track a $3 cost savings through a complex supply chain is fruitless.

If the savings really did just go to C level pockets then the product next year would be less compelling than the competitions so you would logically pick the other offerings.

I would argue that a USB-C cable is equal or higher value then a (USB-A cable plus USB-A brick).

Edit: Oh, they also removed the earpods. Yeah, for the 2020 SE this is a clear move to increase margins. To be fair, it was already lower margin and is still a great value phone.

Or Apple's did. Do you really think they're passing the savings on to the customer?

Honestly, who cares? If you're spending $1200 or whatever on a phone, is your life really that much better if you spend $1190 instead?

Luca their CFO has consistently said on investor calls that they aim for 35% gross margins, so any excess seems indeed reinvested into other features on the BOM or passed on to the customer.

> For me it's an optimal experience

You are a one off use case. The standard deviation for your experience is pretty large. Especially for first time iPhone buyers.

I just switched to an iphone recently and the brick would have been a non issue for me. I already have a bunch of USB C bricks from my android phones going back to the Nexus 5X

Exactly. I don't understand why nobody mentions this, but the decision to ship a USB-C to lightning cable makes a lot of sense when you think about customer segments:

- People who are upgrading an old iphone will still have a USB-A to lightning cable from their old phone, so they can charge their new iphone using their old charger and old cable

- People upgrading from android probably already have a USB-C charger, so they can use the bundled USB-C to lighting cable to charge their new iphone

- People who want to buy a new USB-C charger can do so without also needing to buy a lightning cable to go with it. (The charger can also be used for charging an ipad or magsafe puck, so it makes sense not to include a cable with the charger.)

In short, by including the USB-C to lightning cable, almost everyone who buys an iphone 12 won't need any new accessories with their new phone. (Unless you want faster charging or wireless charging and don't have other USB-C bricks floating around.)

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