I get that by providing a c-to-c cable they're near guaranteeing that the charger you use is high enough watt to support it, but I'm still buying an additional charger just to be able to use this.
If you've bought a new laptop which charges via the USB-C port, then no you don't need to buy an additional charger to use this. The laptop's charger will work with the phone. Both use USB-C PD (power delivery). It's an important enough development that I've been steering all my friends, clients, and relatives towards laptops which charge via USB-C PD.
At some point I'm going to have to either buy more a-to-c cables or new chargers and c-to-c cables, and I don't think I've thrown a single charger out since USB chargers became a thing.
USB-C PD dynamically increases the voltage if the device requests it. Without getting into a lot of electrical engineering, a higher voltage allows you to deliver more power a longer distance via thinner wires. So increasing the voltage was necessary to achieve USB charging rates higher than about 15 W.
USB-A is forever stuck at 5 Volts, so you can't do this with USB-A to USB-C cables. It has to be USB-C to USB-C.
E-waste is for sure a problem, but do that many people actually throw them away? Everyone I know has a dozen plugged in or in drawers, and it's really convenient to have a few spares around for if you're traveling or working in the garage or whatever. To each their own I guess?
It's not really about reducing e-waste, more about simplifying life. Including a charger with every phone made sense when the chargers were limited to 5-15 W and cost like 50 cents to produce.
Due to the complexity and higher wattage of USB-C PD, a capable charger will run you $20-$50. You don't want to pay for a half dozen of these (cost included in the product price) which sit in your drawer and are never used because every device you bought included one "for free". You want to invest in just a few - one for the living room, one for the bedroom, one which you take with you when you travel. That one charger will charge all your devices - phone, laptop, tablet, other devices powered by USB-C PD which haven't been invented yet. (And if you're wondering what if two devices both need to be charged, they make chargers with multiple USB-C PD ports.)
It's a step in the right direction - the start of being able to use one charger to charge anything. That's why you can use your laptop charger to charge your phone. You can use the USB-C PD charger on the newer Macbooks to charge the newer Windows laptop, and vice versa. (You just have to make sure the charger has sufficient max wattage. 65W seems to be becoming the standard, although there are versions which go up to 100W, and a few lower-end laptops use 45W chargers.) I foresee USB-C PD becoming the de facto standard for supplying DC power in cars, boats, houses, etc.. Finally eclipsing the ubiquitous raw 12V DC power (cigarette lighter), which actually varies from about 10.8V to 14.5V and can wreak havoc with sensitive electronics. I'm glad to see Samsung ditched their own proprietary fast-charging standard to support USB-C PD.
OTOH, Apple's decision to exclude the charger from the iPhones is less justifiable. Since the plug is proprietary, the only thing you can charge with them is an iPhone. So the only thing the customer gains by buying the charger is the ability to charge an iPhone, nothing else. What's really sad is that Apple could easily convert its Lightning data and power standards to run over USB-C cables, and have all their iOS devices use USB-C ports and cables.. The USB-C spec was made flexible enough that you can run other standards over the cable. That's how we get displayport and HDMI over USB-C, and Thunderbolt (PCIe over USB-C).
Facebook
Twitter