Samsung put the last nail in the box that contained a charger

There was a time when I would have denounced a gadget maker for daring to ship a phone without a charger.

It was yesterday. Then Apple came up with the idea – Apple with its goody-two-shoes rhetoric on saving the environment while continuing to produce a line of proprietary cables and wireless chargers, one of which you requires anyway to buy a new power brick.

Samsung does not have these problems. It’s all-in-one over USB-C and Qi wireless standard for years, and you can use all such a cable and all charger from any reputable manufacturer to charge your Samsung phone. Heck, those same universal cables and chargers work with laptops and tablets as well – you can use a MacBook or iPad charger to charge a new Samsung phone, as long as it’s recent enough to use the universal port.

Even if you want a new charger, you might not buy it from Samsung these days; While it’s good that it dropped the price of its standalone USB-C charger from $ 35 to $ 20 to mark the occasion, companies like Anker and HyperJuice / Sanho are producing tiny but powerful gallium nitride chargers ( GaN) that you can throw in any bag, not to mention the deck-sized ones with enough power and ports to simultaneously charge a laptop, phone, and tablet.

Photo by Sean Hollister / The Verge

I bought a few, and I’m good at chargers for the foreseeable future. For now, most of the power supplies that come with a gadget are just rubbish, something I’ll have to recycle or attempt to pawn a friend.

It wasn’t always like that. I remember being thankful for the Samsung chargers that came with my Galaxy S6 and S7 because they were the best on the market – remember those right angled tapered wall warts that protruded so ridiculously?

It also turned out to be powerful adaptive fast chargers that worked great for many devices whether they needed fast charging or not. Motorola’s TurboPower charger was also pretty good if I remember correctly, but it only shipped with the company’s more expensive phones, and early USB-C versions had a fixed (non-detachable) cable.

There are still arguments why smartphone companies should continue to combine electric bricks with their new devices, such as how there will always be people who have never owned a phone before and who will not have a charger. . Many will also point out that these companies are doing it for selfish reasons – always charging you the same amount or more for a phone while giving you less value in the box. (It’s also fun to talk about the duplicity of these companies.) But as my colleague Dieter put it succinctly last June, I don’t care: let’s get rid of 300,000 tonnes of e-waste and help the brand new usb stick to the world. Buyers of C smartphones get their chargers elsewhere.

With Samsung, Xiaomi, and Apple all ditching the charger, it’s effectively over no matter how you feel. By market share, these are the number 1, 3, and 4 brands, respectively, accounting for almost half of all smartphone shipments worldwide, and in the US, it has been a Samsung and Apple duopoly for years. . But more importantly, the world of smartphones has long been where Apple and Samsung lead. The supplied phone power supply is dead.