Samsung put the final nail in the box that used to contain a charger

There was a time when I would have protested a gadget manufacturer for daring to sell a phone without a charger.

That time was yesterday. So Apple was the poster boy for the idea – Apple with its nice rhetoric about saving the environment while continuing to produce a series of proprietary cables and wireless chargers, one of which requires you to buy a new power pack anyway.

Samsung does not have these problems. Everything has been included in USB-C and the Qi wireless standard for years, and you can use any such cable and any charger from any trusted manufacturer to recharge your Samsung phone. Damn, those same universal cables and chargers work with laptops and tablets too: 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 may not buy it from Samsung today; while it’s good to have lowered the price of your standalone USB-C charger from $ 35 to $ 20 to mark this occasion, companies like Anker and HyperJuice / Sanho produce tiny but powerful gallium nitride (GaN) chargers, that you can play in any bag, don’t mention the size of a deck of cards with enough power and ports to charge a laptop, phone and tablet simultaneously.

Sean Hollister / The Verge photo

I bought some of them and I’m fine with chargers in the near future. For now, almost all the power brick that comes with a gadget is just a piece of trash, something I need to recycle or try to pawn on a friend.

It was not always so. I remember being grateful for the Samsung chargers that came with my Galaxy S6 and S7 because they were the best on the market – remember those right-angled conical warts that jutted out so ridiculously far?

They were also powerful fast adaptive chargers that worked perfectly for many devices, whether they needed a quick charge or not. Motorola’s TurboPower charger was also very good, as I recall, but it only came with the company’s most expensive phones, and the first USB-C versions had a fixed cable (not detachable).

There are still some arguments for smartphone companies to continue to bundle power packs with their new devices, such as the fact that there will always be some people who have never had a phone before and will not have a charger. Many will also point out that these companies are doing this for selfish reasons – still charging the same amount or more for a phone and giving it less value at the box. (It’s fun to criticize the duplicity of these companies, too.) But, as my colleague Dieter said succinctly last June, I don’t care: let’s get rid of 300,000 tons of e-waste and help out the world’s remaining USB. Smartphone C buyers get their chargers elsewhere.

With Samsung, Xiaomi and Apple getting rid of the charger, it ended effectively, regardless of how you feel. By market share, they are the number 1, 3 and 4 brands, respectively, accounting for almost half of all smartphone shipments in the world and, in the United States, it has been a duopoly between Samsung and Apple for years. However, the most important thing is that the smartphone world has long been in the lead of Apple and Samsung. The power pack on the packaged phone is dead.