How much Apple saved by removing charger, Earpods from iPhone 12 box

When Apple launched the iPhone 12 last year, it made one major change in the phone’s packaging: it removed the charger and the Earpods from the box. At the time, the iPhone maker had said that the decision had been made keeping in view the company’s environmental goals.

“People often already have all that [charger and earpods]. It’s sitting around in their house. They have multiple ones. And so, it was kind of not the right thing to do in terms of the larger environmental goals and the larger benefits to the environment,” Kaiann Drance, VP iPhone marketing later explained in an interview with Good Morning America.

Now, we have the exact numbers as to how much money Apple saved by removing the charger and the Earpods from the iPhone 12 box.

As per a Bill of Materials (BoM) analysis by Counterpoint Research, Apple saved $4.2 ( ₹308 approximately) on every iPhone 12 box that it shipped. While $4.2 is not a significant amount, especially when compared to the cost of the phone, Apple, as per a report by GizChina shipped around 63 million units of the iPhone 12 last year. Going by this calculation, removing the charger helped Apple save over $264 million dollars.

While Apple might have saved big bucks there, the iPhone 12 cost the company 21% more than the iPhone 11 that was launched back in 2019. As per the firm’s analysis, the company ended up spending more on a whole bunch of components which includes the display system, which cost the company $25.5 more and RF components used the 5G connectivity, which cost the company $19 more on every iPhone 12 unit.

“In the iPhone 12, Apple’s self-designed components including the A14 bionic, PMIC, Audio and UWB chip make up over 16.7% of the overall BoM cost...The shift from LCD to OLED in the iPhone 12 is a big jump, resulting in an over $23 cost increase,” Counterpoint wrote in its report.

“Cost increases are also driven by 5G-related components, with components like 5G modem, transceiver and RF front-end system collectively contributing a $34 increase...The blended materials cost for the iPhone 12 with 128GB NAND flash is nearly $415, a 21% increase over the iPhone 11,” it added.

So you see, while it might have saved a couple of bucks by removing the Earpods and the charger, the technology that it used in the iPhone 12 actually made it costlier to manufacture compared to the iPhone 11.