Two days ago Apple did their whole "Hi, Speed" livestream thing and announced the iPhone 12 lineup, and yeah, I'll get to the actual phones in a second, but the part I can't stop chewing on is the box. Starting with the iPhone 12, you don't get a power adapter. You don't get EarPods either. Just the phone, a USB-C to Lightning cable, and some paperwork you'll throw away without reading.
Apple's official line is environmental. Fewer accessories means smaller boxes, smaller boxes mean more phones fit on a pallet, more phones per pallet means fewer shipments, and fewer shipments means less carbon in the air. Tim Cook and co framed it like they're solving climate change one missing brick charger at a time. Maybe there's something to it at Apple's volume, I genuinely don't know the logistics math well enough to call it fake. But I also don't think that's the only reason, and I'm allowed to be annoyed about the parts that don't add up.
Here's the thing that bugs me: I have, no exaggeration, four different Lightning chargers in a kitchen drawer right now, all of them 5-watt bricks that came in the box with old iPhones going back to a 4S I bought in 2011, back when I first started this blog. Not one of them supports fast charging on a phone that clearly wants a higher wattage adapter to hit its "50% in 30 minutes" number Apple bragged about onstage. So if I actually want the fast charging Apple demoed, I'm buying a new $19 adapter anyway. The old ones in my drawer aren't going to cut it, they're just going to keep sitting there, which sort of undercuts the whole reduce-clutter pitch.
And look, this is going to sound cynical, but a company with Apple's margins saving a few bucks per unit on a charger and a set of EarPods, times however many tens of millions of iPhone 12s they'll sell this quarter, is not nothing. I don't think it's evil or anything. It's just business wearing an environmental jacket, and I'd have more respect for it if they said that part out loud instead of leading every slide with a recycling icon.
Anyway. The phones themselves: iPhone 12 and 12 Pro are up for preorder this week and ship on the 23rd, the smaller iPhone 12 mini and the giant 12 Pro Max come in November. All four finally get OLED screens across the whole lineup, which is a real upgrade if you're still on an LCD iPhone like the XR. There's also this new magnetic ring on the back called MagSafe, a name borrowed from the old MacBook charger, that snaps accessories and wireless chargers into place with a satisfying little click. I haven't touched one in person yet so I won't pretend to have a verdict on how well it actually works day to day.
The other announcement that got a little buried under all the iPhone noise was HomePod mini, $99, a small spherical speaker aimed pretty obviously at the Echo Dot and Nest Mini crowd. Ships mid November. I own zero smart speakers currently, mostly out of a low-grade paranoia about always-listening microphones sitting in my living room, so I'm not the target buyer, but $99 is a real price point for Apple and worth noticing.
I'm not upgrading this cycle. My phone is a two-year-old 11 Pro and it still does everything I need, camera included. But I'll be curious to see, once the reviews land in a few weeks, whether the missing charger actually changes anyone's buying decision or if everyone just quietly buys the $19 brick and moves on like nothing happened.