By Akriti Rana and Nimish Dubey
It was the deadliest year of 2016 when Apple announced that it was doing away with the 3.5mm audio jack. And a wire-hating cult came of age. This cult existed before 2016 but Apple gave a new lease of life to this cult by removing the 3.5mm audio jack from its then flagship phone. Before you knew it, every premium smartphone was saying goodbye to the 3.5mm audio jack.
Like many flashy, fancy-new tech trends, this one too tried to make its way to mid-segment smartphones. While some mid-segments followed suit, attempts to banish the 3.5mm audio jack from the smartphone’s anatomy failed.
It’s very much alive and kicking.
Exit, power adapter?
Fast forward to 2021, and Apple again decided to drop a smartphone supplement. It was what many considered an integral part of the existence of a smartphone – the power adapter. Smartphones have come with wall adapters since their inception, but suddenly the ‘absent charger’ trend was catching on.
With the launch of the iPhone 12 series, Apple announced that the brand will not pair its smartphones with a wall adapter in the box. The move comes as a measure to reduce the tech giant’s carbon footprint. During the launch event, Apple revealed how many of its consumers are repeat buyers and often don’t use the extra chargers that come with new phones. According to Apple, the move was a measure to reduce wastage and removing the adapter from the box also meant that phone packages became smaller, lighter – making them easier to store and less effort and material wasted in packaging. happened.
Like many such moves by Apple, this decision too faced a lot of heat. While there was a small lobby that believed in the good intentions of the brand, most were annoyed that such a premium phone was now going to come without something as basic as a charger. This was heavily criticized and portrayed only as a move to earn more money.
Moving from premium to mid-segment?
While there was noise about Apple removing the charger from its smartphone box, Samsung also decided to follow in the footsteps of its rivals and removed the wall adapter from its premium smartphone package. Google also went ahead and removed the charging brick from the box of the Pixel 6. The trend was catching on.
Apple wasn’t the first to actually let go of the smartphone adapter. It was the Moto G that was launched in 2013 that came without a wall adapter, though it was sold with one in India. The reason for the disappearance of the accessory was actually to reduce the cost of the product and not because of the new era that brands are giving these days.
The absence of a wall adapter in smartphone packages has become commonplace, so many consumers feared that the trend might reach the mid-segment as well. When Samsung recently launched the Samsung Galaxy F23 5G without a power adapter in the box, the footsteps in the mid-segment of this trend could be heard from afar. If one of the country’s leading smartphone brands was releasing a Rs 17,999 phone without a charger in the box, then surely it was only a matter of time before others followed suit.
Relax, the Charger is here to stay in the mid-segment
We beg to differ. We do not see that the absence of a charging brick will become a permanent practice in the mid-segment.
Unlike most of the features coming from high profile phones to mid and then budget segment devices, fast charging has indeed become a major USP of smartphones in both mid and premium price ranges. Brands like OnePlus, Vivo, Oppo, Xiaomi and Realme all use fast charging as an important feature to sell their smartphones.
For this feature to work, brands have to pack in adapters with these smartphones that can actually get the job done in the claimed time period. This is because not all chargers charge the phone at the same speed. While brands like OnePlus have always pushed fast charging to the foreground, the fast charging fanfare has become so intense that Xiaomi even launched an upper mid segment smartphone centered around fast charging – the Xiaomi Mi 11i HyperCharge.
In fact, even in the premium segment, Apple, Samsung and Google are probably the only brands that have removed the wall adapter from their smartphone boxes. The reason behind this could also be that none of these brands actually support fast charging like brands like Oppo, Vivo and OnePlus do. This means they cannot milk the fast charging cow and hence there is little benefit from pairing their premium phone with a charging adapter.
Let us go back to the case of the missing 3.5mm audio jack adapter. While premium phones may have lost the port, a closer look at the mid-segment reveals that almost all phones under Rs 25,000 still have the 3.5mm audio jack. In fact, OnePlus even highlighted the existence of a 3.5mm jack in its latest phone, the OnePlus Nord CE 2 5G.
All of this leads us to believe that while some brands may be on a mission to get wall adapters out of our smartphone packages, we don’t think it’s time for them to go. not just yet.