Apple Lowered the Price of the New MacBook Pro for Most of the European Countries Where It No Longer Ships With an Included Power Adapter

Nick Heer, at Pixel Envy:

First of all, the dollar is not the currency in any of these countries. Second, the charger in European countries is €65, which is more like $76 right now. Third, Apple is allowed to bundle an A.C. adapter, it just needs to offer an option to not include it.

Practically speaking, though, the EU directive regarding included chargers means Apple won’t include one, and likely no other laptop maker will either. They’d have to create, and stock, double the SKUs for every standard configuration. (If you buy a build-to-order configuration of the M5 MacBook Pro in Europe, you get a choice to include an adapter in the build-to-order workflow for an upcharge. If you buy a standard configuration model, you get the option to purchase a power adapter as a separate accessory.)

Fourth, and most important, is that the new MacBook Pro is less expensive in nearly every region in which the A.C. adapter is now a configure-to-order option — even after adding the adapter. [...]

Countries with a charger in the box, on the other hand, see no such price adjustment, at least for the ones I have checked. The new M5 model starts at the same price as the M4 it replaces in Canada, Japan, Singapore, and the United States. [...]

Maybe Apple was already planning a €100 price cut for these new models. The M4 was €100 less expensive than the M3 it replaced, for example, so it is plausible. That is something we simply cannot know. What we do know for certain is that these new MacBook Pros might not come with an A.C. adapter, but even if someone adds one at checkout, it still costs less in most places with this option.

The fact that the new M5 MacBook Pro costs less than the M4 models, even when paying extra to include a new power adapter, leads me to suspect that Apple was planning price cuts in these countries regardless. As Heer points out, Apple cut the price by €100 when the base MacBook Pro went from the M3 to M4 a year ago. (MacBook Air prices have been getting lower worldwide, too.)

Anyway, the reason this regulation is subject to ridicule was never that European MacBook buyers were, effectively, paying for a charger that was no longer included. It’s that this is a silly law, and likely causes more harm than good. If Apple thought it was a good idea to no longer include power adapters in the box with MacBooks, they’d just stop including chargers in the box, worldwide. That’s what Apple started doing with iPhones with the iPhone 12 lineup five years ago. That wasn’t because of a law. It was because Apple thought it was a good idea.

The problem I see with the MacBook power adapter situation in Europe is that while power users — like the sort of people who read Daring Fireball and Pixel Envy — will have no problem buying exactly the sort of power adapter they want, or simply re-using a good one they already own, normal users have no idea what makes a “good” power adapter. I suspect there are going to be a lot of Europeans who buy a new M5 MacBook Pro and wind up charging it with inexpensive low-watt power adapters meant for things like phones, and wind up with a shitty, slow charging experience.

★ Monday, 20 October 2025