I opened a gadget box recently and had one of those slightly ridiculous moments. Device. Cable. Paperwork. That's it. I stared at the empty space inside the box thinking, surely there's another compartment somewhere. There wasn't.
Maybe I've been buying gadgets for too long, because I still remember when opening the box was part of the fun. You didn't just get the gadget. You got the charger, a proper cable, sometimes a case, earphones if it was a phone, and occasionally an adapter you weren't entirely sure you would ever use. Cameras could come with multiple cables, a charger, battery, strap and various little accessories. Half of that stuff eventually ended up in a drawer, but that's not really the point. The gadget felt complete.
Today, opening some expensive gadgets feels more like receiving the first component of a shopping list. Buy a new phone and the charger may be sold separately. Buy a camera and you might still need a memory card, another battery, a charger and perhaps a suitable USB-C cable. Buy a thin laptop and there's a good chance you'll be shopping for a USB-C hub because HDMI, an SD card reader and several USB ports have somehow become optional extras.
I understand how we got here. Removing accessories makes boxes smaller. Smaller boxes mean more products fit into shipping containers. Plenty of us already own chargers and cables, and there is a reasonable environmental argument against manufacturing millions of accessories that people might never use.
All of that makes sense. But something changed when manufacturers discovered that "you probably already have one" could also mean "we don't have to include one." And I'm not convinced the savings always found their way back to us. The gadget didn't necessarily become cheaper. The box just became emptier.
USB-C makes the whole situation even more amusing. We finally have one connector that works across an enormous range of gadgets, but the cables themselves can have very different capabilities. One might be fine for charging but painfully slow for transferring files. Another supports high-speed data and video. Some handle much higher charging power than others. Yet when you look into that drawer full of black USB-C cables collected over the years, good luck remembering which one does what.
So you buy another cable. Then another charger. Then a hub. Maybe an adapter. Eventually you have a drawer containing enough accessories to operate a small electronics shop, yet somehow the exact cable you need is never there.
I'm not saying manufacturers should return to enormous boxes stuffed with accessories nobody wants. I certainly don't need another pair of terrible free earphones just because tradition says they should be included. But I do miss the idea that when you bought a gadget, the manufacturer gave you everything reasonably necessary to use it properly.
There was something satisfying about taking a new gadget out of the box, plugging it in and immediately starting to play with it. No compatibility research. No second Shopee order. No discovering at 11PM that the shiny new thing you just bought needs another RM80 accessory before you can actually use it the way you intended.
Maybe those old gadget boxes contained too much stuff. But today's boxes occasionally feel like we've gone too far in the opposite direction.
I don't need ten free accessories.
Just give me the things I actually need to use the gadget I just paid for.
That doesn't seem like too much to ask.