Mine sit in the box for years until I accidentally run the old one over with the hoover or something. Apple will ditch Lightning long before I run out of cables.

Of course, the right thing to do here would be to drop the price of the phone by some token amount, like £10. Sure the environment benefit is real, but the real driving force is that Apple makes an extra 1% margin on every phone.

It's not about not using it, it's that most people already have at least one (if not a small pile) of power adapter blocks with USB input already.

Right, I have gobs of them too... but they’re all USB type A, so the included USB C cable with the iPhone 12 is kinda weird. People don’t have many USB C bricks yet. So I don’t think the logic of “people have them already” checks out

A lot of people have USB A Lightning cables already.

In no world do most people have USB-C blocks already.

Well, anyone who's had an Android in the last few years would, and they're widely available (and cheap) online.

The unbundling is obviously just Apple pushing people toward their new magsafe charger tech though, (spinning it as an environmentally friendly thing) so they can finally make the jump to completely portless phones.

I think it's recognizing the (at least true for me) reality that I have practically an entire box of wall-to-usb power adapters.

Wall-to-USB-C?

I have at least three but if you don't why not just buy one and be set for the next eight or so years? It does seem like a huge waste that every device in the foreseeable future will ship with a new USB-C charger that is quite redundant.

Just buy a new Macbook, it comes with a USB-C charger. :)

But you can't plug that into the iPhone. Because the phone has lightning port. And the other end of the included cable is USC-C male. And all previous adaptors (the white box that goes on the wall) are USA-A. So yeah... no cookie.

The Macbook charger has a brick with a female USB-C end, and a male-to-male USB-C cable. Which you can unplug from the brick and plug in the USB-C-to-lightning cable, in theory.

Now if you need to charge both, and you have the one-port Macbook, you're SOL. If not, you can plug the phone into the laptop...

Good solution to boost Macbook sales then, I guess.

Well, I do hope the proposal to buy a Macbook so you can charge your phone was tongue-in-cheek. Because that's a pretty daft solution compared to buying https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MHJA3AM/A/20w-usb-c-power... for $19 if one doesn't have an existing USB-C brick.

I actually never take any of the cables out of the box but I'm probably more of an edge-case. I take out the phone and use Anker cables/Qi-chargers and my AirPods Pro.

I don't really miss the power adapter as I have so many USB power sources and I will never miss those crappy earbuds though I do miss the headphone jack.

Yeah, having an on-device DAC was really the killer feature for me. I'm fine using a lightning-to-3.5mm adapter but trying to be clever and putting the DAC in the adapter didn't work out super great for me since they seem to break super easily.

I never got the adapter to actually work, it's like there would always be bad contact even though the port is clean. Extremely unreliable.

I've just stopped listening to music on my phone.

Any phone that has speakers, must be having an on-device DAC, even if there's no headphone jack.

Right, I just mean that's it's not connected to the lightning port. Apple's lightning-3.5mm adapter conceals a small DAC inside compared to Google's approach on the older Pixels where USB-C just carried the analog signal which I think was a better, albeit more complicated, design.

Pixel 2 had the DAC in the dongle, not the phone.

I was definitely a bit skeptical of that claim too. Seems questionable. I use nearly every charger I've gotten with a phone (except for pre-USB ones)

Does everyone except me have a power adapter with a USB-C port on it? I’ve definitely never got one off Apple, though my Apple stuff is at least 2 years old so maybe they have been shipping them? But if I got one of these phones that cable would be useless, except I guess for plugging my phone into my work laptop without using a dock.

The included power adapter is really bad (1A, USB-A). Currently nearly all my devices charging via USB-C, except my company provided iPhone. I just bought a USB-C to lightning cable so I can charge it via my Macbook or Pixel charger

To be honest, this move by Apple is good for first world countries where many people may keep their older devices and power adapters, but will raise the costs in other countries where people usually sell their phones (with accessories) and replace those with new ones. Oh wait, people in first world countries do trade-ins too.

I think a minuscule number of people won’t mind this. For the rest, these phones are going to cost more than before with the additional purchase of adapters.

You're right, but to add a datapoint, I've done a few phone trade-ins that never included power adapters/accessories. Just the handset itself.

When I traded my last phone in, I brought in the charger and was told to keep it -- that they throw power adapters away. No one wants to buy a refurb phone and have the cord suddenly fray a month later.

Calculated to help them sell the fast chargers. Until now, every iPhone came with USB-A chargers so yes people have a lot of them, but they are allll USB-A.

Last year's model came with a fast charger in the box.

I thought that was only for the 11 Pro.

They will include a charging cable, just not the white box that plugs into the outlet