The best course of action is for consumers to stop being so consumerist. Use products until the end of their useful life rather than upgrading or replacing sooner than needed. I definitely DON'T do this myself, but then I believe a lot of the enviromental huffing and puffing is overblown anyway.
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Apple to Stop Including EarPods With Every iPhone Sold in France From Next Week
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Can we have this as featured comment - this really nails it, thank you, good Sir! ?
They should remove the phone, but keep the price the same, and the environmentalists could cheer them on and buy the empty boxes, but then, likely, we could also save the entire box, and just keep buying iPhones without phone or box and it would be radically saving the planet while also giving Apple $1,000 ever year.
It’s really absurd that some bureaucrats (whose expensive salaries are paid by taxpayers) sat around thinking of this stuff when the much more nimble free markets can, and does, solve these problems much faster.
If French consumers really wanted a phone with a wireless headset, and Apple didn’t provide one, then Apple would have gone out of business in France a long time ago. Or, the most likely outcome… Apple would have included them in the box without silly gov’t regulations.
If French consumers really wanted a phone with a wireless headset, and Apple didn’t provide one, then Apple would have gone out of business in France a long time ago. Or, the most likely outcome… Apple would have included them in the box without silly gov’t regulations.
You're forgetting the most important point about AirPods, the battery will degrade and can't be replaced.
I love using my EarPods, yet unfortunately enough wear and tear that they get replaced more often that they should. Rarely has ones from a previous iPhone survived to be used with the new one ?♂
2022: buy 1 phone, 1 charger
2025: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2028: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2031: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone, 1 charger (the other one stoped working)
2034: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2037: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2041: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2044: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone, 1 charger (the other one stoped working)
2047: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2050: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
2053: sell 1 phone, buy 1 phone
So during a 30 year period you only bought 3 chargers and only 3 chargers were produced. If it was included in the box, 11 chargers would have been produced.
There's your reduction in carbon pressure.
And you don't even need to have one charger dedicated to iPhone. Since it's USB you can share with iPad, Apple Watch, Macs and PCs (depending on the charger), Android phones and tablets and all other devices which supports USB charging.
Let's say you have 10 devices in your household which uses USB-charging. You could buy 2 or 3 chargers to charge all of them instead of having one charger included with every device.
You can't avoid USB-C for the rest of life. Sooner or later you'll have a device which uses USB-C.
If you only have USB-A chargers, you get a USB-A-to-Lightning cable or use the one you use for your current iPhone.
Can't you see the good thing about making chargers and cables independent of a particular device?
So you're saying that the french government, instead, was really voting to give Tim Cook a pay raise? i.e. If the French government wasn't voting to screw over their citizens - they'd have included a subsection that stated prices would also have to be reduced by the retail price of the headphones?
Let's say you get your 1 iPhone when you're 10 and the last one when you are 80. You get a new phone every 3 years.
70 / 3 ≈ 23 iPhones
I have never had a USB charger stopped working, but let's say its average lifespan is 10 years.
70 / 10 = 7 chargers
So during a lifespan, about 16 chargers didn't need to be produced because of the independence from the phone.
Imagine the USB charger being able to used for all kinds of charging: iPhones, iPads, Macs and PCs, drones, electric toothbrush, electric razor, tools like drills etc.
If you had 20 such devices in a large household, you could get away with maybe 5 chargers.
These people don't want to see a good thing, they want to get angry that Apple might make some money off the back of it.
Today that's the new normal...Entitled aggrievance and outrage at the drop of a hat.
The number of people switching from Android to Apple isn't that big. And many of them will have had a USB-C charger included with the Android phone they're using know or from some other device.
But you are just thinking about their next purchase. Think about the next 50 years of their life. They might have to buy a USB-C charger now, but they can reuse that for a long time and for other devices. The charger gains a life independent of the device or devices it is charging.
Exactly. The process has to start somewhere else we'll forever be including the charger in the box. Someone needed to be brave enough to stop including it. Like the 3.5mm jack
They make us a very very small percentage of the market. Why should all suffer for the good of a few?
only until a new "standard" comes along and then everything has to start again from scratch.
just like we did when micro-USB to USB-A was made the standard port, or when apple changed from original port to lightning. the new standard will be USB-C to USB-C for a limited amount of time, but Apple throw a spanner in the works by using lightning to USB-C (except for the iPad devices they have chosen to use USB-C on).
all the apologists are missing the point though.
the plug and cable should be made optional in the box, not mandatory in the box.
if someone comes along that buys a device that doesn't already have the required charging options then they should be given the option of having them included.
that means those that don't need those items don't get them, but those that do need them get them included.
it's not like apple aren't already manufacturing the cables and plugs anyway (to sell to you at a nice markup), so there in real terms there acually is no environmental benefit.
yeah there are only new 385,000 potential smartphone buyers born each day.
even if only a small percentage of them buy a smartphone, that's still a lot.
Apple can manufacturer far fewer cables and plugs than previous as not as many are needed.
and is there any evidence that they are?
i suspect they aren't, because they know people will need to buy them, and it makes for good profit margins.
but you chose to comment on one very small part of my post, and ignored the rest?
If we assume 100% smartphone saturation (all 385,000 will buy a smartphone), 346,500 will buy an android phone and 38,500 will buy an iPhone, which is 14 million iPhones a year out of about 200million apple sells each year.