Apple is facing a lawsuit in Brazil for not including charging heads in iPhones.
A Brazilian consumer group has sued Apple for selling iPhones without chargers, and a São Paulo state court has ordered Apple to pay a fine of 100 million Brazilian reals ($19 million). In addition, Apple has been ordered by the court to provide chargers to customers in Brazil who have purchased iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 in recent years.
Apple said it will appeal the court decision. The judge who decided the case said that not including a charger with the purchase of an iPhone was an insult to consumers, forcing consumers to buy a second product to do the job in the first place. Apple is in trouble with Brazilian authorities for selling iPhones without chargers.
Also in 2021, São Paulo’s consumer protection agency Procon-SP fined Apple around $2 million for violating Brazilian consumer protection code for removing the charging adapter from the iPhone 12. In September of this year, the country’s justice minister issued an order to ban the sale of iPhones without chargers in the country.
Along with the order, it also imposed an additional $2.38 million in fines and ordered the iPhone 12’s registration to be canceled with Brazil’s National Telecom Agency. Apple has appealed this decision. Starting with the iPhone 12 introduced in 2020, Apple stopped installing power adapters in iPhones. By removing chargers every time you buy an iPhone, you can give back to the environment and save copper, He said it would save 861,000 tons of zinc and tin production.
The Brazilian Ministry of Justice does not accept this reason. Apple said that the company’s products could either switch to the USB-C system and help the environment in other ways. The European Parliament has voted to establish USB-C as a common charging standard within the EU, so iPhones that will be introduced at the end of 2024 may come with USB-C charging systems.