To be fair: I have not used the Apple supplied charger to charge my MacBook even once. It is bulky compared to other options (I just take a 20W charger with me on the go, which surprisingly is plenty) and when I am at home, I have chargers everywhere anyway.
/edit: however: no one is forcing Apple to demand 70€ in case someone wants that charger. A much smaller fee or a free option would have been much nicer. At least in the meantime. There a still a lot of people that don’t have usb C PD chargers (often thanks to Apple, because they stuck to lightning so long)
Lenovo just let me add a 65W USB-C charger at no extra cost. It’s GaN too. I know it’s probably not actually “gratis”, but at least they don’t have to ship e-waste with every order.
If all the laws I’ve gotten behind from the EU this one is some stupid shit.
I get it with the low wattage chargers, I’ve got a drawer of them and they are just waste at this point but no one is giving away 50w or higher for free.
Then the right question to ask Apple would be: “Why isn’t the MacBook 70€ cheaper?”
Because if it isn’t, blaming the EU law would just be a puny diversion from company greed.Apple is pretty famous for doing a lot of price ladder stuff. You can jump up to the next tier of a product by paying an extra $100 or so, and then once you get into that next tier, you see that the upgraded product has a cool feature you can unlock for another $100 or so.
Those price ladders are pretty carefully crafted and they make the company a lot of money. I’ll bet that they’re going to keep those price points the same until all MacBooks and iPads are being sold sans charger.
That said, there are ways that Apple could’ve given people a complimentary chargers if they needed one. Hell, if I spend n about of money, give me credit toward a free item.
When Samsung did that around here (claiming they were importing the idea from the EU), they sent people the charger for free if they asked. They started including the charger again later, so I guess it wasn’t very well received.
But well, shortly after, when Apple did it, and charged people $15 for the charger, they were heavily fined.
Goose meme
Who sets the price?
WHO SETS THE PRICE MOTHERFUCKERS
One of the fallacies of the EU anti-charger legislation is that the buyer may well have multiple USB-C chargers, but not have one which fulfills the charging requirements of the device (USB-C power delivery is a complicated thicket of wattages and capabilities as this PC World article notes: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2331534/the-bewildering-world-of-usb-c-charging-explained.html ).
The 96W charger shown is at the higher end of USB-C’s power delivery profiles, which further lessens the chance that a user will have an optimal charger on hand.
Yeah, the law was made for micro-USB and USB-C is a mess…
To make it worse, some companies decided the top voltage would be 18V, while others use 21V or anything in between… So it’s not clear if the power brick you brought, that satisfies all the numbers from the device will actually be useful to charge the device.
It sure sucks that USB-C is such a mess. I was promised an end to messes with USB-C.
Love Apple or hate them they really did try to make it the universal standard way back in 2016.
They released their entire lineup of laptops as USB-C only and were mocked endlessly for it.
If only the IT world had jumped on board at that point we might not have the mess we have today.
I was excited about the one cable future back then.
Well, we got the plug that is correct both ways…
That’s a fantastic start!
What’s complicated?
Every charger says what max power it has, it’s pretty simple.
The only issue is that cables don’t have to be marked, but until 60W pretty much anything will work.
Agreed, this is all only a problem if for some strange reason you’re not willing to look at usb-c charger and cable specs that you buy, I have a brick and charger that do 100w, I only buy cables that take 100w ,all my devices require less then 100, and it works every time. Gosh, so hard. Never mind that if you take that very small step, it does work every time, the usb C connector is very robust and reversible, and now I have truly universal charging.
I like the no charger supplied rule. I can pick my own cool charger.
