Reminder: AirPods 5 Do Not Include a Charging Cable in the Box

As long as they include AirPods.

Apple’s environmental virtue signaling is hard to take seriously when it sells effectively disposable earbuds with tiny sealed batteries that become e-waste after a few years, yet somehow including a USB-C cable is the problem. The cable probably costs Apple next to nothing, but save even $1 on tens of millions of units and suddenly the real motivation becomes obvious: margins, not the planet

Apple’s environmental virtue signaling is hard to take seriously when it sells effectively disposable earbuds with tiny sealed batteries that become e-waste after a few years, yet somehow including a USB-C cable is the problem. The cable probably costs Apple next to nothing, but save even $1 on tens of millions of units and suddenly the real motivation becomes obvious: margins, not the planet

Totally with you on this.
Just brought my 1st gen AirPods to Apple Store because the batteries are dying.
They told me it cost $49 to replace the battery for EACH AirPods. So, I'd be looking at $98 to replace both when the AirPods 4 are retailing for $99 at Amazon all day long. 🙈

Reducing e-waste, they say. 🧐

Definitely was not expecting anything else. Was the same with AirPods 4.

Yeah, that's why we framed it as a Reminder. It's not news, but it's also something that could easily be overlooked, so hopefully we helped a few people.

Next year ship it in a bakers bag. Biodegradable of course.

I wish they would at least include power and data cables with iPhones, iPads and Macs. The big issue to me is the cables suck if I can’t use it for both power and data anyways. So I really don’t mind this, but the idea of removing everything doesn’t really sit well with buyers.

At some point, Apple has to stop thinking like bean counters and consider the whole package of the product and realize what the customer is paying for versus what it costs them to add that little thing in the box. Sort of like nickel and dime your customers at your own expense in the long run and they will find a better option.

Apple also overprices these things in their store and will try to sell buyers one if they can, which makes it worse because a cheaper alternative is probably a better cable that does both data and charging - eventually everyone catches on, and when they catch on they realize the company really didn’t have their backs only their shareholders backs.

Include everything needed to use the product.