Samsung's new Galaxy S21 smartphones won't come with a wall charger or headphones

Technology 10:55 AM - 2021-01-16

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Samsung unveiled its three new Galaxy S21 smartphones on Thursday – and none of them come with a wall charger.

 

This is a first for the South Korean smartphone brand, but echoes a similar announcement made by Apple in October.

 

Samsung's slimmed down packaging will now just contain the phone, a USB cable, and an ejector pin, which is used to insert the SIM card. The double-ended USB-C cable can be used to charge Samsung's phones by plugging it into a laptop or wall socket converter.

 

Samsung said it decided to ditch wall chargers for sustainability reasons, per CNN, which first reported on the news.

 

In October, Apple said its next iPhone wouldn't include wired earbuds or a wall charger in the box for the first ever time. Apple similarly cited environmental reasons for the decision, saying it could create smaller, more sustainable iPhone packaging.

 

"It's like removing 450,000 cars from the road per year," Apple executive Lisa Jackson said at the time.

 

The new S21 phones are considerably cheaper than the models they're replacing: The two standard versions, the S21 and the S21+, offer a discount of $200 on their S20 counterparts, and the high-end version, the S21 Ultra, is $300 cheaper than the S20 Ultra.

 

The removal of the accompanying wall chargers is unlikely to have made much difference to the price: When purchased separately, wall chargers on Samsung's website range from $30 to $50.

 

The new models won't ship with headphones either, which is already the case for some of Samsung's models.

 

 

 

PUKmedia / Business Insider