Walk into any phone store this week and you'll notice something missing from the box.
Both can be true, but neither is the whole story.
The real story runs through Brussels, not Cupertino.
The European Union's common charger directive forced Apple to abandon its proprietary Lightning port on the iPhone 15 and adopt USB-C.
It also nudged manufacturers toward selling devices without chargers, on the theory that households already own plenty.
When you strip the charger from the box, you don't remove the charger from the world.
The $19 cable and the $29 brick didn't vanish.
They became an upsell at checkout, often sold at margins the phone itself can't touch.
A law meant to reduce e-waste created a tidy new revenue stream for companies already selling you the phone.
A tangle of cables, half of them Lightning, half USB-A, one mystery connector from a camera nobody remembers buying.
It just guaranteed the next cable you buy will eventually join the pile when the standard shifts again.
Inside that identical oval, cables differ wildly.
Some carry enough wattage to charge a laptop.
That's the quiet trick of a universal connector: uniformity at the surface, chaos underneath.
For American buyers, the practical effect is a slow tax on the unprepared.
Buy a new iPhone and your old car cable is useless.
Buy a new Android and the cable from two years ago might not fast-charge it.
Every upgrade now includes a scavenger hunt through a drawer that never quite has the right cord.
The EU says it will revisit the rule as technology evolves.
That's a polite way of admitting the mandate is a snapshot, and snapshots fade.
Wired charging may not even be the future.
The standard they fought so hard to impose might be obsolete before the drawer is sorted.
What's left is a lesson about mandates generally.
They solve the problem visible on the day they pass.
They rarely anticipate the workarounds, the upsells, or the drawer that somehow keeps growing.
You also got a smaller box, a bigger checkout total, and one more chore for a Saturday afternoon.
Final Thoughts
The people who wrote this rule meant well.