They are a huge tech company. They sound have a checkbox in the checkout flow that lets you add a free cable if you need one.
fear not you can buy an apple magic connector for just $60
runs at usb2 speed probably.
For me this would mostly be a non-issue. I’ve got enough extra USB-C cables that I don’t even unwrap the ones Apple has been shipping. Not to mention that I’m pretty used to charging my AirPods via MagSafe these days anyway.
If I send you an address can you ship some extras, mine seem to die or you get ones that are only 4inches long with something. Throw in that now many devices only have USB C on both ends so your last phone that sold with a USB A to USB C cord, that no longer plugs into new devices, I am always at a shortage.
If I knew you locally, I’d be open to giving it away. But with the cost of shipping even light usb cables, I think buying a UGREEN cable from Amazon might cost about the same.
The 4 inch ones are awesome! I have a whole collection of different 4 inch cables for when I travel, and for when I take my laptop to the cafe. They’re also great for microcontrollers, like the mouse jiggler I made from a pico 2040.
I’m glad someone has found their use, hanging devices off outlets never seems safe to me, or the device just falls as you eventually stretch out the charging ports.
Wish I had a collection of various colored chargers now. You may have inspired me to figure out a way to color code charging devices now.
I just keep it simple. When I travel, I bring my power bank and a tiny cable to charge my phone. When I get to my destination, I recharge my power bank with a longer cable. At each place around my house where I’d want to charge something (desk, bed, etc), I keep a charger nearby, either already plugged in or neatly stored near the outlet.
I never need to worry about where a cable is, because I always have one handy, and it’s just the right size.
Everyone I know has at least 10 USB-C cables lying around, what’s the point of shipping more e-waste?
Next step: Apple removes hardware from box and ships aspiration only.
They have a concept of hardware
With theoretically chamfered edges.
I don’t know why but that sounds like something Jony Ive would come up with
Courage! Think(ing) Different!
Ok, let’s be real here. A charger can last a decade even if the charging speed slows…a cord will not outlast a phone. If it does, there’s a serious issue
I see you’ve been using apple cables. Other cables will absolutely last ten years or more.
Good, I don’t need any more. Remove them from all boxes.
The Pixel Buds don’t ship with a cable either.
I’m all for it IF the cable is provided for free on demand to 0,001% of customers who happen to not have one. I have a separate drawer for all my extra usb C and micro usb cables which come with random electronics which I feel bad just throwing in the trash but I know I’ll never need.
If they were free on demand for people who asked with their purchase:
None of the people who need them would get them.
Most of the ones that did get handed out would still be to people who never used them.
Why is that?
Because there’s very little overlap between people who need them and people who know that it’s an option.
The people claiming them would primarily be people like me who do know how it works, know that I probably won’t use it, but am going to take it anyways, because it’s free and because it is within the realm of possibility that I need another cable as a temporary replacement until I get another one.
Simple solution: if a device you sell comes without charging cable, it has to be written in large letters on the box that you have the right to claim one for free (like cigarette health warning) and the seller has to inform the customer before checkout
Then everyone will claim one and you’ll increase waste.
The whole reason they’re removing the cable is because of pressure from governments not to waste materials including it.
xD no? Why would everyone claim one? I for example would be fucking glad not to receive e-junk with all my purchases
Because it’s free. I guarantee you 90% of people will take free shit if offered free shit.
Including it for free completely undermines the whole reason for removing the cable.
I’ve already got a charger for every room of the house and every vehicle I drive, so I’m don’t really care about that, but I’d be peeved if I didn’t even get a cable.
But cables wear out.
Agreed. The life of a phone includes multiple cables (unless someone here knows some trick I don’t), so including OEM hardware that’s tested and recommended for the device is great and I wish it were still standard. Phone manufacturers not including parts that they still sell separately seems to have little to do with environmentalism/conservation and much to do with profits.
I’ve used the same cables for years with no problem. You don’t yank them out of ports using the strand, you don’t stress the connectors by winding tightly or making them bend at sharp angles and just treat them with care.
I’ve used an IKEA lightning cable for years and treated it really badly and it’s still in perfect condition. The official lightning cable from Apple had to be replaced every two years (it’s my employer’s phone and we upgrade every two years, stupid waste) because it was always destroyed and I had to give it back in perfect condition.
The quality is also a factor.
On the contrary, I’ve had a USB cable last multiple phones before. I think the trick is to avoid using it when it’s plugged in as much as possible. Another common pitfall is that microfiber (pocket lint) can build up in the charging port over months and years, resulting in a poor connection. You can usually remove this by turning the phone off and using the tip of a wooden toothpick to gently scrape out the lint.
I definitely think they should include a cable in the box though.
Agree with this and the other commenter, the cable that came with my last phone stayed in the box and hasn’t been unfurled. I also agree this is almost certainly more about profit than environmentalism, but unused cables are e-waste, and I like to use a longer cable so the short ones that come with the phone have limited use case for people like me.
Cables are not eWaste. They are just copper and some plastic. Except, if you have a 5 amp cable including a eMarker, but this is only needed for laptops and crazy china phones that charge with more than 65 watt
No? I use the same usb cable and QC3 charger I got with my 2016 Xiaomi
It very much comes down to how you use them. Within my household, I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple cable go bad. However I’ve had third party bad from purchase, and my teens go through cables every 6-12 months.
What kind of abuse do your cables go through?
- do you pull from the hard plastic or the cable?
- are they on the floor being stepped on or with chairs rolling over them?
- when carrying are they just stuffed in your backpack or neatly rolled up in a plastic pocket or in a baggie?
- when tangled, do you just pull harder or do you untangle?
I honestly can’t be mad at this point because what they SHOULD do is sell cables in bulk packaging to the Apple store, and then when they sell a phone they say “Do you need a USB cable? Free with the phone.” If they say “No we’re okay I’ve got hundreds of them by now” no problem, if they say “Yeah in fact can I get two?” Sure. Same with chargers. Of course this is Apple we’re talking about, so they’re probably $69.99 each.
There is a good Adam Savage video on yt about the engineering of the thunderbolt or whatever cables.
They still should be shipped in bulk to the store but it makes more sense why they wouldn’t be given away free
I could understand if you were buying a pay-as-you-go phone on the cheap… but this is an iPhone you’re talking about. What’s the minimum, $799? I think they can afford to toss a cable your way if you need one.
iPhones don’t come with those expensive high-bandwidth cables, they come with charging cables that only do USB 2.0
I’ve had one apart and to be fair they are not carelessly made. They’re jacketed in soft silicone under the braid and have thicker than average stranded conductors. You can totally use whatever cables you want, but theirs are built a little better than you’d think and they just feel nice.
Maybe this is a tactile/autism thing for me?
Why even have a box at this point? Just put the phone in the mail by itself, it’s durable right?
As long as a standard “unblessed” usb-c cable will work fully with the phone it’s non-issue.
Surely. /s
I don’t get why even use their “blessed” hardware.
When I was at school, a few things made me want it:
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Apple was still kinda fine back then, playing nice with FOSS community;
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I had good memories from using QuickTime under Windows 2000;
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I’ve been Jobswashed by a few books for kids saying how innovative he was;
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I had a PSP, it was really cool to use for listening to music, playing games, reading books in the Web (over wi-fi) and even Skype, and I thought iPhones seem kinda similar;
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I was possessed by imitated (was bored, wanted to feel something real and heroic) romantic feelings and real (bright hair, greenish-gray eyes, warm smile, subtle voice, and at that moment she seemed intelligent and nice ; turned out not as honest though) sexual desire of one girl who had an iPhone, a perfect product placement, one can say;
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Apple’s UIs back then seemed very usable, only later I actually tried them and realized that even Windows makes me less furious;
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It still wasn’t today’s Apple, they seemed trustworthy.
None of this applies today.
One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.
A lot of people say that you can get X laptop with similar specs for $600 or whatever. But they usually have shit screens or are made from cheap plastic.
I still think Apple is a bit expensive, but a comparable windows laptop is not too much cheaper in most cases.
Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.
But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.
It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.
Just curious about what you do that needs 64gb ram?
Not the person you responded to, but my m1 max macbook pro is used to dry run changes to my kubernetes cluster by running 4 virtual machines and networking them. My previous pc could pull it off fine, but my macbook can run a virtual cluster for hours on battery.
Because of the unified memory, you can use all of your ram as video ram for the purposes of running a massive LLM if you want local AI. there’s a plugin I run for VScode that emulates github copilot but runs entirely on device and offline.
Apple’s ARM implementation is really nice for getting a lot of specific work done. Mine spends most workdays docked and being used as my primary workstation.
Lots of chrome, 1 VM with 8 gigs of ram. I was using > 28 gigs of ram on my old laptop so when I got my new one I made sure to get 64.
Yeah it’s the package. The semi broken entryspec mbp from 2015 I got to repair and keep has a mousepad that is at least on par with my current 2 yo high tier thinkpad. Now take a laptop from that era and the difference becomes more noticeable.
Because you’re getting a product that you know isn’t a cheap knockoff that will burn your house down, and you know it will charge your phone at the fastest speed it’s capable of.
You can of course get the same experience buying third party, but then you have to spend time doing research on which one to buy for your device, and the reputable third party brands can cost just as much as the Apple ones anyway.
and you know it will charge your phone at the fastest speed it’s capable of
Are you really advocating for buying an Apple-branded USB-C cable?
Yeah, why not? A quick look at Best Buy and I can see that the Apple USB-C cable is $15.99 and the cheapest reputable third party USB-charger is $13.99. You save a whopping $2.
So if you’re a deal-oriented shopper you’re probably not even going to buy from a reputable third party, you’ll probably go with the $6 one from the gas station of dubious quality. And you’ll probably be fine. Or maybe after 3 months it causes a short and burns your house down. Best $10 you ever saved.
Or you can take literally all of the guesswork out of it and just go with whatever manufacturers cable, spend the extra $10 on a cable that will last you years. The point isn’t buying something Apple branded, they don’t even brand it physically. The point is to just buy something guaranteed to work.
I can get a Anker 2 pack 6 feet USB-C cable for $11 lol. Why in Christ’s name should I buy an Apple-branded cable?
But then again, I don’t have anything from Apple, so moot point I guess
OK, where I live the price difference is not the same.
If you can get a much better deal on a Belkin or Anker cable or anything you know is a decent brand then I’d say go for it. You don’t NEED an Apple cable. It’s just a fool proof way to get a cable that you know will work well.
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They should remove the USB-C ports, so you have to send it back to Apple for charging
Soon as we can figure out micro nuclear reactors it may actually work that way!
Beta-voltaic batteries are already a thing.
Huh, you’re right. I didn’t know about that. From Wikipedia:
The Chinese startup claims to have the miniature device in the pilot testing stage. Unveiled in January 2024, it is allegedly generating 100 microwatts of power and a voltage of 3V and has a lifetime of 50 years without any need for charging or maintenance.
Wonder if it microwaves your balls when it’s in your pocket too.
Either way we can dream of a future where we never have to plug in to charge again.
It’s old tech actually. They use it in pacemakers because it’s too difficult to replace or recharge the batteries. I guess you could do wireless charging now, but would you feel much safer with a lithium battery inside of you without a good cooling system? The body’s internal temperature is surprisingly warm when you start doing the engineering.
