It seems like there is a wave to ditch accessories included in smartphones and Samsung is rumored to be next.
According to Sammobile, Samsung phones may ditch the charger next year as part of the accessories included in the box.
According to a report from Samsung’s home country, the company is discussing plans to exclude the charger from the box components for some smartphones. If they decide to go ahead with this, we might see the first Samsung phones to ship without a charger starting next year.
This report follows another speculation where a famous Apple analyst claimed that Apple will remove the in-box accessories that includes the earphones and charger to offset the cost of the 5G components.
The decision by these companies to remove accessories like chargers is very controversial. Chargers have been resilient as an accessory when buying a phone for decades. We have seen accessories like HDMI cables, USB on the go cables and more be phased out but the charger has always remained as something we expect in the box.
Companies like Apple and Samsung have massive supply chains and they churn out millions of chargers every year. These companies combined sold over 503 million phones in 2019 which means if they decided to stop including this, they will save on costs and the environmental impact of having such chargers lying everywhere will be greatly minimized. This is because it is not uncommon to have multiple chargers around and it will be environmentally conscious not to add them in the box.
However, such changes will also be viewed as a greedy attempt at selling these chargers separately. Apple was accused of this when they ditched the headphone jack. The benefits of removing chargers include smaller packaging and possibly cheaper phones but we will have to see how this will turn out.
