What you need to know
- Apple Watch Edition and Hermès no longer come with chargers.
- Apple already stopped selling chargers with Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE.
- The ditching of the charger in the other models only happened in the last few days.
Apple has removed the 5W charger from its Apple Watch Edition and Apple Watch Hermès packaging, following on from the decision to do the same with Apple Watch Series 6 and Apple Watch SE.
The move must have only happened in the last few days, with MacRumors pointing out that some people recently received these watches with a charger in the box.
Apple said during the Apple Watch Series 6 announcement that chargers were being removed from packaging over environmental concerns and it did seem strange that the two high-end watch models still had one in the box. It was thought that the sheer cost of those models dictated the need for a charger to be in the box, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
As our own Bryan Wolfe noted last week, from an optics perspective, this seems less than ideal.
Removing a power adapter from Apple Watch requires more than just taking it out of the box, the box also needs to be redesigned to fully benefit the environment. It's certainly possible Apple just needed more time to make sure the Hermés and Titanium boxes had the right packaging design without the wall adapter, and didn't want to delay the release of the new models in the meantime. It looks like we can expected to see people receiving Titanium or Hermés Apple Watch Series 6 models in the new packaging over the coming weeks.
While no Apple Watch now ships with a charger in the box, buyers will still get the Magnetic Charging Cable and can plug that into their own charger just fine.
Apple is expected to remove the charger from iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro packaging when they are announced next month, too.
