Brazil federal consumer protection regulator has started confiscating iPhones from retail stores after the country’s justice ministry ordered that they may not be sold without chargers.
According to a report from Brazilian publication Tecnoblog, Procon-DF seized “hundreds of iPhones” from several carrier stores and Apple resellers in Brazil’s capital city, Brasilia.
The effort forms part of “Operation Discharge”, an attempt by the regulator to get Apple to comply with the decision by the justice ministry agency Senacon, made in September 2022.
Apple has requested the government to allow sales of the iPhone without charging bricks pending the outcome of its challenge to the justice ministry’s order.
According to a report from MacMagazine, a judge in one of Brazil’s federal courts recently ruled that the decision was an abuse of power.
In that instance, he found it was illegal for Senacon to single out Apple over the iPhone’s missing charger when numerous other electronic devices were sold without charging bricks.
Apple stopped shipping its iPhones with charging bricks with the release of the iPhone 12 in 2020, punting the decision as a way to reduce its environmental impact by cutting down on potential e-waste.
Instead, it only provides customers with a USB-C to Lightning charging cable, which is incompatible with almost every USB-A charger it has shipped with iPhones since 2007.
Users without a USB-C charging brick had to buy one separately to use their new charging cable, or use an old cable with a USB-A connector.
Apple also removed the charger from the boxes of the iPhone 11 series.
Senacon maintains that this consequence harms consumers by effectively forcing them to bundle an additional product with their purchase.
Brazil’s regulator and another court have not been happy with Apple’s approach.
After the justice ministry ordered sales of the iPhone without chargers to be suspended, a São Paulo Court of Justice fined Apple 100 million Brazilian reals (about R320 million) for continuing to do so.
That came after Apple had already accumulated about 20 million reals (R64 million) in fines for selling the iPhone 12 without a charger.
Source: My Broadband
