Comment by teekert
8 hours ago
They are free to charge you extra for taking the charger out of the box. So I'd grant them a bit of civil disobedience on this one and just take that nice GaN charger.
I can see the EU's take on this, and maybe overall this will even be good. I have some nice Anker chargers and can charge everything we have at home with them (added some USB-C to ligthning/micro-USB thingies here and there), but I'd be a bit annoyed if the EU would force my company operating with small margins to have 2 versions of my packaging workflow.
Maybe they should just "encourage" good behaviour? With a law that is less forcing, ie just say: "If you offer a version without charger, the price must be the same as with charger. " That would (slightly) encourage leaving it out, while not forcing companies' hands.
The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one. 65W GaN chargers are a nice sweet-spot at the moment (size/power/price-wise), ie Ikea has one at 14 eur), wouldn't mine having one or two extra.
The easiest option to implement would be to have separate SKUs for the charger and the laptop. And not three SKUs: laptop with charger, laptop without charger, separate charger.
If you ship to multiple countries you can reduce the SKUs even more as the laptop SKU isn’t country specific anymore.
Offering a version without the charger for the same price would not reduce ewaste which is the point.
The laptop SKU probably would be country specific due to keyboard layouts though.
Forgot about that one! And EU devices need an engraved trash-can (WEEE symbol)
https://europa.eu/youreurope/business/product-requirements/l...
> The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one
You do realize you’re paying for the charger, right? And you don’t like the option of not having to purchase the charger?
Sure. And support is paying for people that are buying chargers that are too weak. Or otherwise crappy.
This is a Dutch source, but BTO charged 25 eur to remove the charger [0], because they prefer not to deal with people trying their own wonky chargers. Ok, so this was a 100 W+ laptop, arguably different (BTO only does this with 100 W+ models).
[0]: https://tweakers.net/nieuws/245774/bto-rekent-25-euro-boete-...
BTO does that because their laptops use more than what USB-PD can deliver (240 watt). That is an understandable use case for supplying a power adapter.