So the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro are officially out today. If you preordered when they went up last week you should have one sitting on your doorstep right now, assuming your delivery driver isn't still stuck behind whatever's happening on the roads near me (there's a water main thing two streets over, don't ask).
I'm not upgrading yet, my 11 Pro is barely a year old and I'm cheap about this stuff, but I've been reading the unboxing posts all morning and the thing nobody can stop talking about isn't the A14 chip or the 5G or the flat-edge design that's apparently a callback to the iPhone 4. It's the box. Specifically, what's not in it.
No power adapter. No EarPods. Just the phone, a USB-C to Lightning cable, and some paperwork. Apple announced this back at the "Hi, Speed" event on the 13th and framed it as an environmental move, less packaging means smaller boxes means more units per pallet means fewer shipping trips means lower carbon footprint. And look, I get the math, I actually believe the math. Millions of phones times a slightly bigger box adds up to real fuel burned.
But here's my actual complaint and its not really about the environment at all. Its about the cable. Apple ships a USB-C to Lightning cable now, not the old USB-A one, which means the cable in the box is functionally useless unless you already own a USB-C wall adapter or a newer Mac. I have a drawer, an actual drawer, full of old Apple chargers going back to I think an iPhone 4S brick, and not one of them will plug that new cable in without buying a separate adapter Apple conveniently sells for 19 bucks. So the "we're saving the planet" pitch runs straight into "also please buy this small plastic brick separately," and I dont think those two things sit together as comfortably as Apple wants them to.
I know the counterargument, most people already have a charger from some previous iPhone sitting around. Fine, probably true. But the cable swap kind of undercuts that argument for anyone whose stuff predates 2018 or so. My mom's charger is USB-A. My car's charging port is USB-A. Half my house is USB-A. This isn't a huge deal, it's a 19 dollar adapter, I'm not going to pretend it's some grand injustice. It's just funny to me how a decision gets announced with a very tidy environmental rationale and then the actual lived experience of it is "go buy a thing."
Anyway. Preorders opened on the 16th, and from what I've seen online the initial supply mostly held up better than some past launches, no huge outages reported, which is honestly a little surprising given everything going on this year with shipping and factories running under all sorts of restrictions.
Separate but related thought: this was a genuinely weird week for big tech news generally. The DOJ filed its antitrust suit against Google on Tuesday, which under normal circumstances would be the only story anyone's talking about, and instead its sharing headline space with a phone box. I don't have anything smart to say about the Google case yet, it's going to take years to play out and I'd rather write about it once there's an actual filing to pick apart instead of guessing at what a lawsuit that just got filed might eventually mean.
If you did get your iPhone 12 today, curious whether the no-charger thing actually bothered you in practice or if it's one of those things that sounds worse in a blog post complaint than it feels holding the phone. I suspect it's the latter for most people. I still think it's a little cheeky.
One last thing while I'm thinking about cables and small annoying infrastructure decisions: if you're ever setting up a personal site or a contact form and want something that doesn't fight you the way Apple's box did, I've been using Tricknowtech for hosting and domains on a side project and it's been refreshingly boring in the good way. No surprises in the box, so to speak.