iPhone 12: These brands poked fun at Apple once… then ended up doing the same thing

Apple made the headlines recently for a unique reason—the iPhone 12 series does not come with a charger in the box. Instead, you’ll only receive a USB-C to Lightning cable, which you’ll need to use with a USB-C charger of your own. Despite claims that this is part of a sustainability effort, Apple has been subject to a little derision, with competitor Samsung sharing a post that pokes fun at the Cupertino-based company.

Editor’s note: OnePlus has just hopped onto the trend, releasing an ad which assures users that the Warp Charge 65 charger will be included “all-in-box”.

However, before we all join in the fun, it’s important to remember that brands—including Samsung—have taken aim at Apple’s strange-at-the-time decisions in the past, only to eventually follow suit. Remember the iPhone X, and how Samsung took aim at the notch by comparing it to an unfortunate haircut?

As we all know, the company has since released smartphones with notches. The Galaxy M series, for starters, was the first to feature the Infinity-V display—just a couple of months after debuting that unforgettable haircut. Thankfully, those days have gone, and now, most Galaxy smartphone utilise hole-punch cutouts to house their selfie camera setups.

Travel back four years to 2016, and you might remember Google releasing the first Pixel phone, while announcing that it came with a 3.5mm headphone jack that was “satisfyingly not new”. Apple, of course, had launched the iPhone 7 without a headphone jack, offering Lightning headphones or dongles as alternatives.

As it turns out, Apple may have had a point when predicting that headphone jacks would be obsolete one day—after all, TWS headphones have grown in popularity, and affordability as well.

Samsung, for their part, also jumped on the bandwagon and released an ad that was clearly aimed at the jackless iPhone 7. And as we all know, from the Galaxy Note 10 onwards, most of the Korean company’s flagship smartphones now miss out on headphone jacks. In fact, most high-end smartphones, and even tablets, come without 3.5mm ports now, and it has become a norm that most users have begrudgingly accepted over the past couple of years.

In fact, you could argue that Apple have been trend-setters over the years—the good and the bad. Despite the mockery that they have faced from competitors, notches were huge for a number of years on phones from virtually everyone: Huawei, Xiaomi, and the brands mentioned above. Wireless headphones are a must-have these days, too.

Perhaps omitting the charging brick from the iPhone 12 is a little too much, though. Using third party chargers, you might not get the maximum charging speeds that the iPhone 12 can handle; if you want to play it safe and get an Apple official charger, you can pick up a 20W charger for RM99.

Apple also decided not to include Lightning EarPods with the iPhone 12. Not a big deal for me, but if you don’t have a pair of wireless headphones, good luck finding a pair of Lightning headphones lying around. Or, well, buy a new pair of EarPods for RM99, or a Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle at RM55!

When Samsung releases its next flagship device, watch this space. We might have to start stocking up on third party fast-chargers in the meantime. After all, there have been rumours that the Korean company already plans to ditch chargers sometime in 2021.

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