Charger and EarPods Not Included

We’ve been hearing rumours for a while that Apple was going to be removing bundled accessories from its iPhones this year — specifically charger and EarPods — and the company basically tipped its hand in this regard last month when it announced that it would be doing this with the Apple Watch.

So when Apple’s VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, took the virtual stage, we pretty much knew what was coming, although she did a good job of laying out exactly why Apple was making this decision.

In fact, Jackson began by talking about Apple’s goal to have zero environmental impact by 2030. Having already achieved a 100% carbon neutral position in its actual operations, the next logical step is to make sure that it can also achieve this in its product chain.

According to Jackson, there are already over two billion charging adapters out in the world made by Apple alone, not to mention the many many billions more from third-party manufacturers. Combined with the fact that many Apple device users choose to purchase wireless earphones, or even just different wired earphones, removing the charger and the EarPods from each iPhone box will significantly reduce Apple’s carbon footprint.

But that’s not all, since of course this allows Apple to reduce the weight and size of each iPhone box, reducing shipping costs. Based on our own math earlier this year, the weight reduction of each iPhone box alone would work out to the equivalent of ten Boeing 747’s or about half the displacement of an Arleigh Burke class destroyer, but Jackson put it in even more realistic terms by noting that the ability to put 70% more products into each shipment will actually cut two million metric tons of carbon emissions annually — or the equivalent of removing 450,000 cars per year from the roads.

In our opinion, it’s a reasonable price to pay for the environment, as Apple will still sell chargers and EarPods for those who actually need one, but they’ll avoid the waste of giving away tens of millions of accessories to users who will either discard them or simply never even take them out of the box in the first place.

The iPhone 12 will still include a charging cable; it’s going to be a USB-C to Lightning cable to enable fast charging, however, and customers will simply have to provide their own USB-C adapters if they don’t already have one.