Apple chose the simple one that will effectively reduce e-waste instead of doing some convoluted workaround where they hand out Apple gift cards with Macbook purchases or offer the charger for free.
...but, for the last time,
that was Apple's commercial decision - not the EU's. They had other
genuine choices. I've already given a bunch of examples of other companies offering optional "complete kits" at a discount over the individual parts, you've even added your own example with Valve.
Expecting Apple to give hardware away they don't need to give away and comparing that to free trial periods for streaming services is also unrealistic.
Why? They're still giving away a product/service that they could have charged money for (...and, at one point, they were giving away 6-12 months subscriptions to ATV+, not the usual 30 day freebie you'll get any streaming service).
Apple chose the simple one that will effectively reduce e-waste instead of doing some convoluted workaround where they hand out Apple gift cards with Macbook purchases or offer the charger for free.
What's convoluted about it? Many other businesses hand out vouchers/cashbacks/freebies with far cheaper/lower-margin products - it's not rocket surgery. It makes the products sound more attractive, and a carefully-pitched voucher to spend in the company store can be a loss-leader that actually makes more money.
This thread title is "EU didn't stop Apple from including..."
...and that is the whole point of this thread. Apple had other perfectly viable choices - the "Valve" solution would have satisfied the EU. A reward scheme for forgoing the charger would have potentially saved more waste. Discounts would have encouraged people to buy universal chargers that could charge all of their current and future devices. We can debate which of those would be more successful, or more "Apple like" but that's not what the EU is demanding.
(you have to maintain 2 separate product lines)
Only if the MBP packaging is so badly designed that they can't just drop the appropriate charger - or not - into the shipping carton at point-of-order (or hand it to you at the Apple Store). The chargers are already boxed-up as separate product lines. All the talk of "in the box" here is purely figurative - whether the charger goes in the glossy Mac packaging, the outer shipping box is irrelevant, the issue is how much extra you have to pay for an adaptor that was previously included in the price.
This is my main beef with Apple - they're selling premium-priced, if not luxury, high-value, high-margin products while ruthlessly stripping their logistics to the bone as if they were running Poundland and had to squeeze a living out of wafer-thin margins. If Raspberry Pi can offer a choice between bare-bones board-in-a-box and an all-you-need kit - or Ryobi can offer a choice between a bare drill and a kit with batteries, chargers and case - on products costing <£100 why do people think that it's some sort of commercial impossibility for Apple to offer two versions of a £1600 SKU?
except I still think nearly everyone would take a free optional charger whether or not they need it, and that would defeat the environmental purpose of excluding the charger
Thing is, though, the EU directive doesn't prevent that and I don't see how they
could sellers from offering free or discounted chargers without resorting to the worst sort of regulatory micro-management. At some stage, you have to leave a role for the consumer to make a choice. Personally, I'd leave a free charger behind if I really didn't need it - at the moment I could probably use
one more but that would be it - and I'd rather have a high-power multi-port one than what you used to get bundled with a base MBP.
I suspect that lots of people ordering Macs are just going to add a charger anyway (if £60 was a big deal you wouldn't be buying Mac) out of convenience rather than think "do I need one?". A year or two down the line people will have forgotten that the old Mac price had the charger somehow 'costed in' (which is pretty unknowable anyway). I suspect that a positive enticement saying "Drop the charger - get a £x Voucher" would be more effective at making people stop and think.
I'm skeptical about the whole "save the planet" thing anyway - these things contain lots of copper and should be profitably recyclable - but since the side-effect is to establish a common standard and reduce the old habit of price-gouging on proprietary replacement/extra/spare chargers I don't see a downside to "unbundling" beyond the likes of Apple using it as a cover for stealth price rises.
