Apple will allegedly be selling the iPhone 12 sans-charger, according to ear-to-the-ground analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Possible reasons and/or excuses include; increased profit margins on iPhone sales, increased charger sales, more aesthetic packaging opportunities, the fact that "people have lots of iPhone chargers anyway", and lessened environmental impacts. However you try to rationalize it, the result is the same - expect not to find a charger in the box if you buy an iPhone 12. 

Here's the rub though; you won't care soon anyway. Come iPhone-12-launch-eve, you'll have long justified to yourself why it's okay that the charger isn't included in the box. By the time other smartphone companies are nixing the chargers from their boxes in 1-2 years time, all this will have been forgotten. It's a tale as old as the idea of a company itself: Make an anti-consumer decision, use your marketing clout to "explain" why this decision is actually in the consumers' best interest, let other companies in your industry follow suit once consumers have gotten used to the new idea, and rest safe in the knowledge that most people have forgotten that you did anything at all.

Life moves on and people ultimately don’t care. Smartphone companies know this. It is part of their business model.

Seamless, right? Elegance and simplicity itself. Exactly Apple's style. Their software "just works", and so do their stunts. Remember the headphone port scandal of 2016? The iPhone 7 was the first iPhone to drop the headphone jack. Apple called it "courage". They knew that people would eventually accept it so it didn't really matter what they said. It's a common misconception that Apple was the first to dis-include the headphone jack from their device, but the actual first company was some no-name Chinese manufacturer that no-one cared about, way back in 2012. Later, Motorola Released the Moto Z in the United States, also without a headphone jack. Few people payed attention because it wasn't Apple doing it, and therefore it wasn't cool to shit on them. Samsung launches a scathing attack ad making fun of the iPhone's lack of a headphone jack, but then take it out of the 2019 Galaxy S10 anyway. Classic consumer electronics move.

By the time that Samsung released their flagship device without a headphone jack, the world had already moved on and accepted a headphone-jack-less future. Right now, the in-box charger space is where the headphone jack space was in 2016; people think they're mad, but they'll nonetheless end up buying the new product and soon after forget that chargers were ever offered in smartphone boxes.