2. Impact assessment study: unbundling of chargers for mobile phones and similar devices (June 2021) - to identify different regulatory and non-regulatory policy options to achieve unbundling and address the technical pre-conditions and consequences of unbundling
3. Technical supporting study: wireless charging technologies used for mobile phones and similar devices (April 2021) - to analyse and update on the status of wireless charging technologies
Good, though in practice it's not the charger the problem, I use the same USB plug everywhere, it's Apple and their cable. Right now I always need with me a micro USB cable, an USB-C one, and Lightning, because Apple thinks different™.
What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
I can think of 3 reasons:
1. A lightning port is slightly smaller than USB-c, so it enable Apple to keep their phone slimmer than the competition in theory.
2. Apple loves to be in control of everything. With lightning, they could make a switch to a "lightning 2.O" cable / port whenever they so pleased. With USB-C they would be restricted by the USB-IF.
3. They can sell more cable and licensing fees this way. With USB-C, everyone will be able to buy a better and cheaper cable than the Apple ones, and Apple won't receive even a cent from them.
> 1. A lightning port is slightly smaller than USB-c, so it enable Apple to keep their phone slimmer than the competition in theory.
In theory sure but in practice there are thinner Android phones with USB-C connectors than any iPhone. Basically these days the thickness is purely about how good camera you want and how much battery. The usb/lightning plug is not really an issue.
For the record the thinnest iPhone is iPhone 5 at 7.6 mm and thinnest Android is Xiaomi Mi 11 Lite at 6.8mm
Also from a purely user experience point of view making the phones thinner then they mostly are now does not add anything instead just makes the experience worse as the phone will feel worse when hold (if the other dimensions and weight stay the same)
Those are all reasonable arguments, but the argument I most believe reflects Apple's internal thinking is pretty much just "everyone already has lightning at this point, switching to USBC would make headlines in a bad way, generate a ton of lightning e-waste, and Qi is so close to wide adoption that maybe we can just jump USBC for these small devices which don't need 30watt+ of power".
The argument that its a physically smaller port feels like an "Apple circa-2016" argument, not an "Apple circa-2021" argument. They just made the iPhone 13 0.25mm thicker to fit a bigger battery (among other things); I think they've moved past the "thinner at any cost" argument (though I do believe that was an argument for lightning at one time).
"Control" is a tenuous given they've thrown USBC/Thunderbolt on everything except the iPhone. They already have a massive voice inside the USB-IF; switching the iPhone to USBC would only increase their strength among the USB community. And sure, they'd still have to be standards compliant, but I really don't think "lightning 2.0" is ever coming, period. I think they have the hard metrics to prove that 0.1% of iPhone users ever use that port for anything except charging.
And selling more cables is also tenuous. They'll sell USB-C cables anyway; I just paid them $30 or whatever for one for my laptop charger, because the two offbrand ones Best Buy sold me couldn't carry 85 watts.
The best argument I've ever heard for lightning is actually: Physically, its a MUCH sturdier connector. Just look at the inside of a USBC female port, versus lightning. There's just less stuff; USBC has a big tooth that sticks out, whereas lightning is just contacts along the outside. Lightning connectors, and cables, are much simpler, and thus less likely to experience damage over time.
So, yeah; I think they want to skip USBC and go right to Qi, basically seal up the entire outside of the phone. And I can't say I disagree; my iPhone only ever charges over Qi. But, maybe its worthwhile to just make them keep USBC around, if for no other reason than e-waste.
Lighting still has a "tooth" (actually two) on the socket side. The choice of keeping the teeth in the connector for USB-C is intentional, the idea is for the wear to be in the connector and not the device.
You also don't need a 30$ cable for 90W, any cable that is rated for 5 amps will do the job.
I think this was a typo and you meant to say “cable connector (plug), not device connector (socket)”.
It’s a good design and specifically designed to avoid a USB mini A design botch in which the device side would wear out before the cable side did.
FWIW Apple is a USB member and participated in the USB-C design, including learning from lightning (which was comtemporaneously secretly under way). This is like Intel and IEEE-754
They use USB-C everywhere else, including their iPads. If it was about control, why did they abandon lightning for their iPad line, or FireWire for their computer lines?
To me, this smells like internal turf protection or politics.
I think most iPhones on offer are a fair bit thicker than their Android counterparts. Specifically, most Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones are smaller than all but the Mini iPhones.
Besides, what's the point of a thinner phone when you got a huge bump for the camera's. Rather it be a bit thicker so that there is more room for battery.
I personally really wish for a flag ship phone like the Galaxy S21 Ultra that doesn't have such a huge camera array.
IMHO, the camera bumps are also just ugly. That is mitigated by protective cases, but still thicker phones would be more robust and have place for larger batteries. That being said, modern day phones all look the same anyway, once they are in a non-transparent case.
I’m always amused at people who upgrade to the latest phone regularly and then keep it in a bulky case. Around iPhone 5, I switched to buying 1-year old used phones about every 2-3 years and enjoying them without a case.
Only non-minor damage I’ve suffered is I broke the volume down button (the spring behind it, really) on my Xs Max. Minor scratches I don’t care about. I’m pretty amazed at how durable the phones actually are and, if I break one now, it’s probably an $85 screen and an hour of my time or worst case a $400-600 replacement phone.
Cases are overrated. Sure, they may protect from some scratches, but they don't protect agains fall as much as people think, and I think they induce falls by making large phones even more difficult to hold.
I bought a IPhone 12 pro max six months ago, never used a case, still looks like new.
> keep their phone slimmer than the competition in theory.
This always struck me as a solution looking for a problem. Are modern phones really that chunky that we have to sacrifice functionality to shave a few fractions of a mm?
Just curious, for which use cases is weight a significant problem? Even the heaviest phones - rugged or foldables - seem to hover around 300g.
That shouldn't be at all tiring unless you are holding them for literal hours nonstop, or unless you're a small child - and in both scenarios it's good to be encouraged to put the phone down after a while.
Weight is important for some people like me. I'm not anything special or have disabilities, but I really prefer lightweight smartphones. Heavier smartphones (say > 200g) significantly increases tiring on single hand use. Weight balance is also important. I'm Japanese and I can confirm some similar people exists but seems to not majority. Maybe who use smartphone in both hand never care about weight.
Moving to USB-C doesn't mean anything from licensing or certification fees. USB-C offers ways of cable authentication, so nothing needs to change there. There is nothing that USB-IF restricts that would get in the way of certification or licensing.
The lightning cable is not required for the MFi program, you can certify lots of things for MFi. Not sure why they couldn't expand the program to USB-C cables. They might do it already, honestly.
> With USB-C they would be restricted by the USB-IF.
Apple will still find a way to do what they want, especially given they play a non-trivial role in the USB-IF and provided significant resources towards developing USB-C in the first place.
I would like USB-C on my iPhone, but I think the biggest reason why Apple hasn't done it is just because of momentum, and that it _is_ a switch from the current situation.
I mean, technically, they can keep using the same connector (usb-c) but make extensive change to the underlying protocol making it required to buy an "Apple cable" for anything else than charging and maybe still respecting the U.E law.
Similar-ish but the waste aspect isn't there: each car does not come with its own gas station and most people do not own multiple redundant gas stations already.
>(f) Every retailer and wholesale purchaser-consumer shall equip all gasoline pumps from which gasoline is dispensed into motor vehicles with a nozzle spout that meets all the following specifications:
>(1) The outside diameter of the terminal end shall not be greater than 0.840 inches (2.134 centimeters).
>(2) The terminal end shall have a straight section of at least 2.5 inches (6.34 centimeters).
>(3) The retaining spring shall terminate at least 3.0 inches (7.6 centimeters) from the terminal end.
If these regulations weren't present, Ford could have it's own gas stations and gasoline that were incompatible with GM's and so on.
They do so — for example hose pipe diameter is regulated so you can’t accidentally put regular fuel into a diesel car (sadly, not the opposite though).
You mean with a lightning connector or a usb-c one ? In my experience, lightning connector were much more easy to break than usb-c one, since there is no actual protection/shielding to the actual pads/connector. It is so easy to snap the connector part of a lightning port.
That's because of EU regulation. All the big manufacturers had their own connector before that, micro-USB started to look like a common connector among the low end manufacturers.
This is the next step for that regulation and has been in the cards for some time.
> All the big manufacturers had their own connector before that
Worse yet, "before micro-USB", chargers universally had a captive cable. Situation that GP describes - same charger, 3 cables - is already an improvement on that.
I am interested in that (because the "secret history" of many market driven change often ends up being a regulator in one influential area made a good decision - the usual example being California and car pollution standards)
Edit: just to say I am not commenting either way on the EU here, or on regulators in general. I am just interested if there was a clear point in USB standards process that EU intervention made a difference.
If so it would be useful to know their track record in this when judging this situation.
EU basically said to manufacturers: Find a common ground for charging cables / chargers, otherwise we will simply regulate it. So all manufacturers apart from Apple agreed to use microUSB (at the time). Apple was still part of this, but decided to simply provide an adapter to microUSB.
These regulations aren’t secret, and are usually heavily reported on — the government wants people to know it is doing things in their favor.
Before the charger regulations the biggest world wide impact of EU regulations was RoHS. That’s when the EU really started to come into its own as a global player. Did you realize all those old cables you still have lying around have lead in them to make them flexible?
Absolutely no, you're making things up. USB was part of the android specification since day one as it was a natural technical choice at that time, due to the availability of chipsets, and due to the fact that google wanted standardization across android manufacturers. There's no alternate universe where google wouldn't use USB because it was not told so by some eurocrats.
Patently untrue: the Micro USB has won over proprietary connectors before the EU regulation, thanks to being cheaper than ever-changing charging & data cables that used to be the norm. That in turn was possible through large volume, and also through well designed standard; it was the third iteration of the plug - after original full sized A/B, and after the somewhat underwhelming Mini USB.
In particular the Micro USB was specced for quite good reliability - including 10,000 plug-unplug cycles, which is quite high for consumer grade hardware, and that was made possible thanks to the sheer experience amassed over years by the USB consortium. Not by regulator's fiat.
That currently USB-C is ruling the market is again thanks to USB consortium's active push, together with large volume of all sorts of devices using it.
There isn't any regulation because the THREATS from the EU to impose it from above was enough for everyone but Apple to fall in line, and that's damn lucky because otherwise we might've not seen USB-C emerge in phones as well as it's done now. (Do we need a new standard in the future? Hopefully that can happen without clunky regulatory processes)
Personally I like my lighting cables and I do hope there'll be a grandfather clause but Apples behaviour(logical for them) has put us in an uncomfortable seat tbh.
> Good, though in practice it's not the charger the problem, I use the same USB plug everywhere
This isn't the first time the EU mentioned those plans, the current situation is basically the phone manufacturers regulating themselves to avoid an explicit regulation by the EU.
> it's Apple and their cable.
Of course there is always that one greedy asshole ruining it for everyone else.
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
They probably considered Lightning to be superior but couldn't make it the industry standard without loosing their ability to charge absurd amounts of licensing fees for it.
> They probably considered Lightning to be superior but couldn't make it the industry standard without loosing their ability to charge absurd amounts of licensing fees for it.
I don't think it's this. Lightning was superior to micro-USB, but it's certainly not superior to USB-C.
I think the problem is that everyone remembers the transition from the 30 pin dock connector to Lightning. Apple has a huge reputation for just changing their cables all the time.
This is largely unwarranted. For the portable devices they had 30-pin for ~10 years, then lightning for ~10 years, and it looks like it's on its way out soon. I think 10 years is a fairly reasonable time to keep ecosystems the same. People don't have 10 year old cables and chargers around.
This reputation is pervasive though. I think they're holding off until they can drop the cable entirely in 1-2 years.
> People don't have 10 year old cables and chargers around.
Yes they do, why wouldn't they? I have mini/micro USB chargers and cables that are older, same for USB A/B cables, same for network cables.
Only cables that get tossed are Apple lightning cables because they are crap quality and fray within 2-3 years, and other non-standard crap (pre-2010 proprietary phone/camera chargers like 30-pin and the like)
> People don't have 10 year old cables and chargers around.
Just looking in my cable drawer I have USB types A, B, mini-A, mini-B, micro-A, micro-B, and C. I also have lightening and apple dock from the original iPhone. I have some weird Chinese cable that looks like USB micro-A and micro-B but doesn't fit either. There are a few barrel connectors from my old Nokia phones. A couple of my wife's old Samsung phone cables. This is just from the stuff I've owned.
So I don’t have to pay for a new ones next time I need one. My headphones need micro-b, my gps uses mini-a for data and mini-b for power, my China phones might use any of the mini or micro connectors - whatever they had a lot of that month, usb-a is the most common connector I find while traveling, raspberry pi uses micro b, etc.
Thanks for your answer! I understand the USB "estandards" going around, but what surprised me was that you kept old Nokia and Samsung charging cables. I got rid of all of them in my last moving.
I think that the idea of the USB-C port on the iPads is to connect external devices. These are more likely to have a USB-C <-> something (e.g. USB-C -> USB-[micro|C|A]) cable that people already have lying around, as opposed to lightning -> something cable.
From the perspective of Apple though, that's another adapter for them to sell. They already make a lightning -> USB-A adapter.
And the idea of a common, readily available for most people, port is exactly what this legislation is about. It should apply to charging cables for phones too.
Probably they think they can make the jump to a completely wireless phone before any USB-C mandates come in.
Apple's timing with the lighting port wasn't great, with it arriving just before USB-C, and I imagine they're very reluctant to change the port on their phones because people already have lightning cables everywhere.
Personally I would love to see USB-C on my iPhone, but I look at my parents, and having the port change for them would be a pain in the arse. All their cables are lightning cables, they don't have any USB-C devices, and ofcourse, all of their cables are the ones that came in the box. I suspect a significant portion of Apple's customers fall into that category.
Not great, but better than I personally expected: "Inductive charging is not as efficient as direct charging [...] An analysis of energy use found that charging a Pixel 4 from 0 to 100 percent on a classic cable used 14.26 Wh (watt-hours), while doing so with a wireless charger took 21.01 Wh, a 47 percent increase. "
"900 million active iphones in use" - CFO Luca Maestri
14.26 Wh * 900000000 * 365 (days) = 4684 GWh/yr
46% = 2154 GWh/yr wasted energy
That's about the total energy output of Madagascar with a population of 27 million people.
There's a lot of reasons why the above numbers are wrong but I just wanted to highlight that at current efficiency, there would be a lot of wasted energy. :)
I did some maths (which maybe some should double check), but for an iPhone with a 12 wh battery. Doing a complete charge cycle everyday would consume an extra 5.6kwh over a year! Far more than I expected.
But thats not point here. Everyone is talking about the climate change and then we want to charge millions or billions of phones with ~50% extra power?
In absolute terms it's nothing though. An average household uses 4000 kWh of electricity in the UK (less than half of the average us household), so saving the 5kWh on 4 phones is a 0.5% saving, which is roughly equivalent to running your home boiler for 10 minutes per year. Turning off your thermostat for one evening would have the equivalent impact of not using a wireless charger for a century.
Do we not have enough symbols? Plastic bags, domestic recycling, plastic straws are all strong "symbols" and yet we're still fighting about a couple of kWh rather than making any meaningful change.
I see a lot of comments suggesting that Apple want to go fully wireless but it makes no practical sense to me. Their MagSafe charger not only charges far slower (as of now), but it's also huge. It's just not practical to ask someone to carry that around with them or take it when they go travelling.
An interesting point to think about is that MagSafe appears to be about 75% efficient (due to alignment of coils from the magnets), but also the battery size on iPhones tends to be much smaller than competitor phones.
For example, Samsung S21 uses a 4000mAh battery. iPhone 12 Pro uses a 2700mAh battery.
At 75% efficiency, it's effectively like charging a 3600mAh battery.
Both likely get a full charge every day. So, even with less efficient charging, you come out ahead vs. a Samsung device.
That's also assuming efficiency of the actual charging bricks is similar. Apple tends to be known for high quality and efficient charger bricks, so it wouldn't surprise me if that has an impact.
Sure, but let's say efficiency comes up to closer to like 85-90%, which should be achievable. Would you suggest that it's still not worthwhile? You'd never need to worry about damaging your charging port, since everything is now solid-state.
I know a few folks that moved to exclusively wireless charging because they broke the USB port on their phones over the years.
Good luck believing that the next regulation in that spirit will not target wireless charging. The motivation on this regulation is the waste produced by endless stream of chargers. wired or not, does not make a difference in that thinking.
Only at the slow 7.5W speed. Despite the fact that MagSafe follows the 15W Qi standard, the iPhone will only charge at 15W with a MagSafe-branded device.
If Apple, for example placed both a USB-C and lightning port on future phones, but the charge speed of the USB was crippled, I’d argue that they wouldn’t be compliant with the EU regulation.
> Apple's timing with the lighting port wasn't great, with it arriving just before USB-C, and I imagine they're very reluctant to change the port on their phones because people already have lightning cables everywhere.
Apple was on the USB-design committee (and lightning experience informed the design) and knew all the timing. The standard wasn’t even finalized for quite some time after Apple started shipping lightning.
Lightning has now been around longer than the 30-pin connector, I really don’t understand Apple’s reluctance. I go of my way to by Type C devices for simplicity’s sake, though still have to travel with micro-A, Type C, lightning, and a special watch charger, grr. At least I have only one type of power brick.
Wireless charging is terrible from an energy efficiency standpoint.
Considering that the standardization effort is supposed to be for the environment, and that includes energy efficiency requirements for chargers, I don't think switching to a less efficient charging method will be looked over kindly.
But it is Apple, who knows what they are going to do to avoid regulation.
I suspect a significant portion of Apple's customers fall into that category.
Existing customers, yes. Apple are probably trying to grow their market share though, which means they also need to consider those people who have usb cables too.
The lightning connector is a more physically robust one than USB-C.
The male lightning connector is a single flat piece; the female connector is a hole with the contacts on the top + bottom of the port.
Compare to USB-C, which has an exposed "tab" in the middle of the female connector, and the male connector has a matching "hole" in the middle.
This makes USB-C more vulnerable to e.g. dust collecting, and damage of the exposed tab. Unlike lightning, which can collect dust in the female port, but it's easily cleaned out using a paperclip or SIM card removal tool.
USB-C puts the compliant side (springs) in the plug. This is the part that fatigues and wears out. Lightning puts it in the socket. This means that Lightning will wear out after sufficient connection cycles, and you need to repair your device; with USB-C you can wear out a cable and just replace it, the device will be fine.
Additionally, Lightning plug connectors have a higher tendency to corrode. This is, I believe because the exposed mating surface on the plug end easily gathers debris (in particular e.g. oils and grease), and that can cause poor contact which can result in oxidation due to heating and electrolytic effects. USB-C does not have this problem, as none of the mating surfaces are exposed to being touched. The debris that tends to collect inside USB-C ports is usually solid fluff, not liquids.
And Lightning is just a terrible standard anyway. iPhones to this day use compressed video over USB2 for their "HDMI" output dongles (which actually have an Ax class CPU in them just to decode the video) because Apple were too short-sighted in their design to allow for enough expandability to support uncompressed digital video properly.
We don't really know that -- USB-C hasn't been out long enough. I can tell you that for durability I hate lightning, because it always seems to have connection problems after a while and the plug itself seems overly complex for what it does. I can't recall ever having any such connection problems with micro USB or USB A for example.
In general it's easy to see also that the lightning connector itself is far more exposed to the environment than any of the USB connectors which are largely enclosed.
This is weird. My experience has always been the opposite. I’ve broken lots of usb-c cables with the metal bit coming loose. Lightening hardly ever. Any connection problems are usually pocket lint in the hole and fixed with a paper clip.
This is not about what connector is better. It is about everyone using the same connector. I believe if Apple allowed others to use their connector for free, they could "beat" USBs and become the only existing standard.
The lightning connector is perfectly capable of supporting USB3.0, ( and they did at one point in time ), but it just doesn't make sense when iPad's ecosystem are more general purpose and requires interaction with USB-C, from display port to memory sticks.
We have one type of electric sockets (at least within each country). But there certainly can exist better kinds of sockets than those used in your our my country. But I am glad that we all have same sockets in our houses, even though they are not perfect.
It can be argued that lightning is slightly better, sure. But billions of people use USB-C daily, and even half of Apples product line only has them instead of lightning, so not sure if the difference is that meaningful.
According to Wikipedia the S7 was first released 2016-03-11. The Oneplus 2 was released on 2015-07-28 which was one the first with a USB-C port.
One of the big reasons for me getting the OP2 was the port and I'm still using it (with LineageOS). I'm sure I would have upgraded long ago if it didn't have a USB-C port as that's what I've standardised on for all my portable electronics.
I’m at a hotel breakfast, so far this morning I’ve seen half a dozen usb-a sockets and not a single usb-c socket.
Majority of electronic devices are older than usb-c standard, even the electric screwdriver I bought two months ago was micro-usb, as is the shaver I used this morning. At work about half the low power devices are PoE or Micro-USB.
That's still just anecdote. I have USB-C for one pair of headphones, two pairs of earbuds, a bedside light/charger, and of course my phone. But I don't assume my experience is universal. I look at data, as should you, and it does seem that there are indeed billions of devices out there using USB-C.
Looks like phones alone account for ~3B in a single year, so no, it's not just laptops. Even if you exclude those, the "consumer electronics" segment looks like it'll go over 1B/year pretty soon. Get out of your bubble.
A trouble with lightning is the dust etc. gets stuck in the phone socket - I've had to replace two at like £50 a go. Getting a new cable is often easier.
I have had similar issues in the past, but instead of having to have a port repaired, when I brought my iPhone to the Apple Store, they simply cleaned out the dust from the port with a SIM removal tool and sent me on my way.
This applies in theory but I see things happen differently in real life. I have got macbook 2016 usb c cable and that dust problem etc has never happened to me. And my android cable are pretty robust too. But the funny thing is I always need to put spring so that join don't gets damaged in iphone charger.
They are both physically robust and very reliable, to the point where I don’t think this is a valid excuse. We’ve come a long way since the early days of mobile phones.
I have like 3 lightning cables, apple deprecating lightning would account to me throwing these cables away and buying usb-c. I suppose other apple users would have to do the same. Not to mention other lightning accessories, headphones and such. Lightning is still included on airpods (pro and max).
Furthermore, usb-c is younger than lightning. And lightning was arguably superior to previous usbs (more durable).
So while unification sounds nice, net gain would be actually close to nothing, it would be a change for the sake of change, and would probably annoy as much people as it would please.
people always look for short term gains while completely ignoring the long term benefits
go look for phone charger waste and why it is important to stop having 4685486468478 different type of chargers, people are very selfish in this thread
Simple. They changed from the 30 pin adaptor to Lightning 9 years ago. People complained to the high heavens about it. I recall Apple promising they would keep the new Lightning adaptor for at least 10 years. Guess what? When the new iPhones are released next year it will have been 10 years. The EU is probably aware of this situation and simply want to ensure Apple doesn't try to come up with some other solution. I don't think they needed to do that since Apple has already adopted USB-C on their iPads.
Bottom line? My prediction is next year's iPhone is going to have USB-C.
I came to the same conclusion. There is so much hand wringing on the internet about it, and most of these people don't remember the 30 pin to lightning transition. Specifically people don't remember what a huge upgrade lightning was over 30 pin or even the USB standard at the time.
The people also talk about huge profits apple is making on charging cables, which just doesn't make sense if you take even a cursory glance at the price of lightning cables on Amazon. I saw numerous multi packs of cables selling for ~$2.25 for a 6ft+ cables. Apple has already signaled the direction they are going with charging standards, and it's USB-C. They are just waiting for the supported lifetime of the lightning cable to be over.
I think by a "charger", the EU means everything needed to charge a device, i.e. including the cables. Which means, that the charging ports should be identical on all devices sold in the EU.
>What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
There are currently more than 1 Billion active iPhone worldwide, even at one lightning cable per iPhone that equates to 1 billion lightning cable in use. And you have iPad and other accessories. I would not be surprise if there are more than 2Billion Lightning cable currently in use.
Seems wasteful to abandon 2 billion cables? Although I suppose Apple could stop shipping cables as well. And only include a Lightning to USB-C adopter.
Not to mention lightning is a better design and higher quality cable than USB-C. Apple could mandate MFi for iPhone USB-C charging as well, but that sort of defeat the purpose of USB-C?
Or even better if EU could mandate USB-C quality and standards. Say not to crappy USB-C cables. Which would be even better than forcing USB-C on devices.
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning
I don't know about other technical aspects but I really like the fact that Lightning male is just a solid block. It's definitely more durable than type-C
> As for Lightning's expected lifespan, the format is estimated to be in use for the next five to ten years, almost identical to the now-defunct 30-pin standard.
Yes, it's nice that we finally have a supposedly universal plug, but we only recently got here. It may be that they simply don't think it's worth it yet to 'force' people to switch infrastructure yet. That the USB-C ecosystem is universal enough (though I'm sure them switching would push it forward).
But perhaps that is the intention: the government can just switch out your USB charger and then has access to everything that isn't covered by Apple cloud yet.
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
The benefits don't outweigh the inconveniences of switching. There's a mature ecosystem around Lightning for third party accessories. And at 50% market share, their cables are pretty ubiquitous. [0]
And they added Lightning charging to other products they ship (Apple Pencil, Mouse, Keyboard, Remote...).
Right now, I don't think USB-C, especially with the smart cables that might or might not support every features, is an improvement over Lightning.
This is a little unfair, when Apple has been more consistent in keeping the same ports and cables, and moved to generic USB-chargers long before it was standard for anyone else?
USB-C wasn't even finalised until 2014; I can't remember how common USB-C was on phones before that, but Apple was using lightning for _years_ before that.
What's the e-Waste consequence of changing and forcing everyone to buy new chargers, adapters, cables when they next buy a new device? Suddenly all the cables and chargers you've been using for ten years are useless.
>USB-C wasn't even finalised until 2014; I can't remember how common USB-C was on phones before that, but Apple was using lightning for _years_ before that.
Everyone else was using micro USB for years before usb-C. So for years, every phone cable except Apple could also be used to charge your headphones, Kindle, Tablet, etc. It isn’t just phones we are talking about. When pretty much all devices are on one standard, and Apple refuses, that is where the e waste comes from. All my micro usb cables are still useful for random older products around the house. All my USB C cables are useful for random newer products around the house. My lightning cable is useful for exactly one item around my house ever at any given time. I have zero other uses for it. People don’t need to go out and buy new chargers and cables because they already have them for their other devices. That’s the whole point of interoperability.
> Everyone else was using micro USB for years before usb-C. So for years, every phone cable except Apple could also be used to charge your headphones, Kindle, Tablet, etc.
There were multiple other connectors in use (the 4 most common were Mini-USB A, Mini-USB B, Micro-USB A and Micro-USB B but that's not exclusive) — I still have a few of them because that “every phone cable” nirvana was never true at any point prior to USB-C. microUSB's fragility also meant that most people ended up buying many cheap replacement cables so from an e-waste perspective I'd be hesitant to say that was an advantage over the lifetime of the device.
microUSB also had many limitations — not just the inconvenience of being handed and easily broken in normal usage but also core features like not being able to supply enough power: many non-Apple tablets used proprietary cables because otherwise it would have taken hours longer to charge.
USB C came out years after Apple shipped Lightning and unsurprisingly is a lot more competitive — it's not like the industry didn't learn from the problems with earlier USB standards and I think that it makes sense for Apple to switch now.
Is that the exact one you've ordered from them before? Is it reliable, can fast charge, etc? I've found usb cables such a huge hit and miss, even buying from "reputable" places, as they just re-sell cheap chinese knockoffs that don't work.
I haven't tried that cable, but I've had a good experience with that shop (Baseus). Unlike Amazon, Aliexpress doesn't comingle listings, so generally I shop by seller I have good experiences with, or just popular ones as they list the number of times an item has been purchased.
Seems like most USB-C cables and chargers on the market are fake. And as per "the market for lemons" the fake $2 chargers that can't output full power without smoking or have zero isolation from power line or refuse to use X/Y safety rated capacitors will push the good more expensive chargers off the market. The "Real World" is a lot more like "DiodeGoneWild"'s autopsies of power supplies than most people think. Its odd, really, just how much more often USB-C hardware catches fire than Lightning hardware.
Submarine patents and the like can't appear on products you invented for yourself. Admittedly kinda far fetched in the case of USB-C. Then again look at historical madness like USB to RS232 adapter knock off chips and drivers written to brick knock off hardware.
Nobody wants the wild west experience of USB-C where nothing is reliable or trustworthy. The user experience is just likely to be better with lightning.
I think they made commitments to manufacturers to keep Lightning around for a certain period. Regardless of standardization Lightning is already showing its age, it’s limiting charging and sync speeds.
Their existing customers will be super pissed having to change all their cables and docks, just like they where when apple went from 30 pin to Lightning.
3.5mm headphone jack with hole drilled in midle carrying optical fiber would handle all use cases i can imagine. From delivering power, charging phones to connecting several 8K monitors. multiple protocols can use separate wavelengths of light, all at once in single fiber. Hundreds of gigabits are possible, maybe more, depending on the length. While still being able to connect wired headphones.
The sockets would need some work for decent power transfer - it needs to do at least the 150 watts that USB-C can do, and preferably 150 kwatts for charging a car.
For 150 watts while maintaining backwards compatibility, all that's needed is larger contact area (curved spring clips) to support 3 amps and the use of 48 volts after negotiation.
For 150 kilowatts we'd be talking some cutting edge stuff, but not beyond the realms of possibility. Specifically, you'd probably need to use voltages up to 20,000 volts, 10 amps, which is going to mean you need to have mating and sealing rubber isolators on both plug and socket at least 3mm thick between poles. At these voltages, you cannot have air between the pins, so it must be a hermetic seal. You'd also need to measure leakage current and keep the cable capacitance low enough that when someone cuts through the cable with scissors the voltage can be dropped in microseconds to prevent zapping them.
The engineer in me says I want to quit my job and spend the next 6 months and $100k prototyping a 3.5mm compatible jack that can charge a car, and safe even when licked by toddlers, underwater, full of grit, and cut with powertools...
But the business person tells me that even if I could do it and make it safe enough to use, there is zero chance any big company would license the tech.
fiber optics are pretty robust to bending, as long as you're happy to suffer lost light.
Pretty much, if you bend it too much, your connection will slow down temporarily till you straighten it again. That seems like a fine tradeoff.
Industrial fiber systems usually used fixed speed, so too much bending leads to a total failure of the connection - hence the strict bend limits on fibers.
USB-C is protocol-agnostic. In alt-mode the extra wires can be used for HDMI, DisplayPort, PCIe, analog audio, or anything else really.
You can also put whatever voltage that can be physically handled over the power pins after negotiating with the other side. USB-PD is the common standard but it can be extended.
Yes, they earn money from the MFI program, but there's no reason to ditch that when changing to USB-C.
Remember the outrage among "normal" users when the Dock Connector was replaced by Lightning? Everyone was upset they'd have to buy new cables - even though Lightning was vastly superior.
Now, there's hardy a difference in the form factor. And make no mistake - normal people don't have USB-C chargers and cables lying around.
They didn't see this as a problem when they introduced lightning and USB-C on their macBooks and high-end iPads, though. Instead you were supposed to buy more future electronic waste in form of dongles.
I think the iPad pro etc lives in a different category. They're all high end devices that are bought by people who either like tech, or use it for work. People who want the latest everything, and are happy to change things like cables to make it happen.
The iPhone at this point is just a phone. I suspect most people own them because their good tools for everyday life. Based on an observation of my parents, their friends, and parents of my partner, I would say that most of them don't give a rat-arse about the port on the bottom. They just want the phone to work with the cables they already have. For many of these people an iPhone and iPad Air will be the only computers they own.
I appreciate that my point is a little undermined by the new iPad Air, but I suspect that iPhone will go to wireless only charging, something the iPad can't do, and Apple don't want to go through two transitions in less than 5 years.
USB-C to USB-A dongles were and are cheap, and USB-C/TB on MacBooks enabled one-cable docking solutions for the first time on the MBP platform so people actually welcomed that.
This concern does not translate well to anybody wanting to switch platforms. This level of sunk cost fallacy would not fly as an excuse for any other technology, let alone on HN.
I have never seen a lightning dock ever. Docks seemed to die after the 30 pin was discontinued. Every car I have seen now uses Bluetooth and has a usb A port for cables.
I agree in theory that it’s good. It’s a pain having to also have a lightening cable with me.
But I will say this - the lightening connector is a lot more reliable than my usb-c connector. It fits better. It falls out less. And it breaks less often - it’s not as bad as the old usb connector but it’s not as good as lightening.
It is reasonable to believe Apple builds a better phone. While I can't speak for the mass of Apple customers, it seems unlikely that they secretly want the European Commission to design their phones.
This is a bad decision, because:
1. The European Commission doesn't have the time or resources to make consistently good decisions about phone design. It is a minor miracle that Apple managed to gather enough talented people together in one spot to give us the iPhone. The EU can't replicate that level of ability (observe the quite remarkable failure of EU phone manufacturers).
2. If (when, really) technology improves, progress will be slowed.
3. Heaven help us if we need a bureaucratic response to protect indifferent customers from nonuniform chargers. There are actual problems in the world they could be focusing on.
> A harmonised charging port for electronic devices: USB-C will be the common port.
> Harmonised fast charging technology will help prevent that different producers unjustifiably limit the charging speed and will help to ensure that charging speed is the same when using any compatible charger for a device.
> Unbundling the sale of a charger from the sale of the electronic device: consumers will be able to purchase a new electronic device without a new charger.
> Improved information for consumers: producers will need to provide relevant information about charging performance, including information on the power required by the device and if it supports fast charging.
There's also a proposed 2 year implementation delay, before it comes into force. And a subsequent rule requiring charger-side USB-C ports, handled through a different regulator.
I'm sure (admission: not read the details at all yet) it doesn't say only USB-C, so there is nothing to stop a wall-plug charger having both port types, C for modern, A for legacy, as a great many already do.
Looks like they're cheap and small, which is good if you end up needing them. So cheap and small, and and useful enough in a pinch, that I just ordered them myself when I found them looking because of this comment, so thanks. :)
I already have these in my wall sockets. Some sockets have USB-A, another one with USB-C. It's great. I hope EU/EEA will pick that up and we can stop travelling with stupid adapters.
The fact sheet speaks to “harmonising charging ports” and a “common port”. That leaves ambiguity between (a) all electronic devices requiring a USB-C port and (b) all ports on electronic devices requiring to be USB-C.
The intention is clearly that the consumer be able to charge any phone using a generic usb-c charger.
Apple's proprietary wireless charging would fail that criteria.
I imagine that if Apple made their technology an industry standard, that a) others could implement, and b) Apple were themselves governed by, then the EU would consider it in addition to usb-c.
Moot for now, though they call out explicitly that if wireless charging becomes common in the EEA they reserve the right to extend the directive to that domain as well.
They sold the iPhone with a USB-A charging brick for like 12 years. Then when the iPhone 11 came out in 2019, it came with a USB-C charging brick and a USB-C to Lightning cable, which would not work with any of the chargers they bundled for the past decade and some. And then, one year after changing the cable, they took away the USB-C charging brick.
"Just use the ones you already have" when you'd only have a wall charger that could take the cable that came in the box if you bought the iPhone 11 as well, or bought a separate charger.
I think it's reasonable for Apple to assume that if you kept the old charger, you also had the old cable for it which would also work with the new iPhone.
It is also completely unreasonable to assume your clients all upgraded to the previous model which still had an USB-C charging brick when all the previous chargers had a USB-A port.
The charger probably costs about $1 to the BoM. I wouldn’t expect to see any change.
But this is not the biggest thing which is that the parts of the iPhone do not determine the price. The price is already set and determines what parts go in. If something somewhere else becomes cheaper, that’s more room in the budget to spend elsewhere whether that be better hardware, hiring more software developers, higher skilled retail workers, etc.
In the end it’s up to the user to decide if what’s in the box provides enough value to justify the price. And from the sales data of the last year, that’s an astounding yes.
But then you subsequently need to buy a charger, which is what? $15 if you want to get a reputable one?
Even if you only got a new one every three phones, that's essentially a $5 tax on every device. ($6 if you consider that the cost of the device wasn't reduced, with a $1 actual cost like you suggest)
I have never had a phone charger fail on me so if we assume that it lasts 3 phones and I buy them every 3 years, that comes out to about $1.66 per year for phone chargers.
It’s not a surprise no consumer cares. The average consumer would pay an extra $100 for their phone to get it in their favourite colour. The cost of chargers doesn’t even register.
The fact that the average consumer doesn't care doesn't make it less shitty. Nobody is sitting around amortizing the cost of chargers by year. Fifteen bucks is a full home screen of paid apps on your new phone.
the law is not meant to punish companies but to reduce e-waste. if everyone uses the same charger there is no need for a new one every time you buy a new device
The valuable part of the charger and the cable is not actually plastic. The point is that replaced chargers account for ~ 1_000_000 kg of e-waste per year.
Cable is 30% copper, 24% stainless steel, 16% other non-plastic materials. EPS is 13% copper and copper alloys, 7% aluminium, 6% steel, 37% other non-plastic components.
According to EU studies, 31% of the EPS and cables are incorrectly disposed.
Entirely agree with your point. However, i would point out that there's many other sources of waste that can be easily avoided:
- food waste and related food wrapping waste
- planned obsolescence (TVs, cars, washing machines, and just about every product out there)
- car-oriented architecture in the cities, where public transportation is an afterthought
- energy waste due to personal infrastructure/tooling (cooking/washing/heating infra, personal TV vs shared screening rooms, etc)
- war and social control: what's the environmental cost (transportation, manufacture of mechanical/chemical weapons) of repression (of, say an environmental protest like the anti-COP21 movement)? what about an outright war on a foreign nation?
These are just examples, but environmental concerns are rather "easy" to tackle given proper political will. The problem is people concerned with the coming ecological apocalypse are either ignored, silenced, bullied, mutilated or murdered by Nation States and multinationals.
The EU is also tackling all those points you mentioned. Many single-use plastics are already banned in the EU, the EU wants smartphone manufacturers to support their hardware for at least 5 years, many EU members give out incentives to improve house insulation, EV will become the norm in a few years and energy standard get stricter every few years.
It's not like the whole EU legislative body is now pushing with all their might to ban phone chargers, it's just a single working group of many.
The EU can tackle more than one issue at once. In fact, the EU has already put out mandates and regulations to reduce food packagin waste and a directive to combat planned obsolescence in TVs and Kitch Appliances.
Well USB cables use some copper and some have gold-plated contacts. In any case, the EU has been complaining about cables for who knows how long, so I guess they have their own reasons, backed by data, to argue for their standardisation.
It surely doesn't make that much sense to let Apple do its own hypocrite thing where they spew out platitudes about the environment while clearly the only driving force behind their decisions is how they suit their financial targets.
Agree. given that USB-C has an insane bandwidth and can power even laptops, there is absolutely no need for different standards. Let's all agree on one and move on. Apple's stance is ridiculous and justifies only some more profit.
Is this something yet to come into law? I find it very hard to buy the vegetables I want at German supermarkets because they so often come wrapped in plastic sets of three. Even bananas have a substantial amount of sticky tape around them.
Digging up rare earth and metals to use them a coupe of years and then throw them in a landfill is insane. I'm happy the EU has stepped in for this kind of regulation.
As for the supermarket, vote with your wallet and buy the less plastic you can.
I think the biggest benefit is that you won't need a charger if basically every train/plane/hotel/school etc can have charging bases for all phones. Just like we don't need to carry a power plug adapter wherever we go
While we're at it, can we enforce some labeling standards? USB-C has become this mystery port/cable that might or might not be capable of video/data/charging at ? throughput. Earlier USB standards had this issue to some extent, but C takes it to another level.
If this was done years ago we’d be stuck using micro or even mini usb. I shudder at the thought. Lightning was superior to those two. Under this regulation, Lightning and USB-C couldn’t have happened.
That's why the EU back then banged the heads of the manufacturers together to force them to come up with a common standard, instead of picking one and forcing it down their throat.
Is that why the standard that USB-C cables use is such a ridiculous mess?
>Even the seemingly most basic function of USB-C — powering devices — continues to be a mess of compatibility issues, conflicting proprietary standards, and a general lack of consumer information to guide purchasing decisions.
Worst examples of USB-C in that list is better than USB2.0...
USB-C is not lacking. You simply get what you paid for. I am using USB-C to charge my laptop, phone, earbuds. It's been amazing having just 1 single cable dangling on my desk, instead of several. This alone has been enough positive to justify the move over to USB-C.
Even charging from cable to cable is completely different. But I do not believe at all that regular people do not ever have the need to connect their device to a computer. They might not most of the time, but that one time they do they'll be kicking themselves over it.
Also, $40 per cable is completely and utterly ridiculous. That's 5-8% of monthly salary of Bulgaria (EU country) for a short cable.
>> Also, $40 per cable is completely and utterly ridiculous. That's 5-8% of monthly salary of Bulgaria (EU country) for a short cable.
That's why you don't buy a $40 usb cable for charging. You don't need all the pins in usb-c standard for all purposes. You can have a few USB-C cables for various purposes. Fully-implemented ones are easy to identify, just by their weight difference really.
>> Even charging from cable to cable is completely different. But I do not believe at all that regular people do not ever have the need to connect their device to a computer. They might not most of the time, but that one time they do they'll be kicking themselves over it.
I wouldn't say they will be kicking themselves over it. If they really cared and knew about transfer speeds of different cables, they would be one to invest in a better cable ahead of time.
If they didn't know about those details, they will have no surprises to begin with. Because it works on par with USB2.0 at least.
First off, I am not sure we need to improve on it in the short term. USB-A has existed for ~20y by now on the desktop and is still going strong. If USB-C lives as long, we'll get a break from having to buy different cables for quite some time, which at least is great for /my/ nerves. When I threw away old phone chargers from 1996 and later, it was literally 10 different models.
And if USB-C doesn't cut it anymore, who's to say that industry can't move to a different system? EU legislation usually isn't outlandish but follows industry practices. If device manufacturers bring up a pressing need for USB-D, EU will allow both for a transition period and then mandate USB-D (or split up mandatory standards by device class if need be).
I don't see how every tiny iteration of a standard has to result in a different plug system - the incentive for companies to iterate plugs just to force consumers to re-buy gear is just too high.
See other thread. If the industry wants it, it is highly effective in influencing legislators. It is called lobbyism and typically we complain about it but sometimes it is also good.
I think it’s a horrible idea. It means moving to a future, better standard (let’s say, USB-D) is neigh impossible as it would require a change to an EU directive (that is: 27 countries need to agree on it).
Just getting this into law has already been in the works for years and years, if the EU had worked a bit faster we would have been stuck with micro USB-B, which would have been unfortunate.
We're stuck with USB A on desktops since the late 90s. It hasn't harmed us. The connector is non-reversible, but it's robust with many, many disconnect-connect cycles and can support higher speeds with USB 3.2. I still use USB chargers made 10 years ago. They work fine.
I think it's fine to be stuck on a "good enough" standard, if this results in less e-waste and less need to upgrade all accessories simply because the dominant connection port changed.
If we wanted to have the standard update itself every 15 years or so, we can have a body dedicated to selecting, or creating, such a standard. We don't write automotive standards directly into our laws, so we don't have to the same with charging port technology either. As the maxim goes, "every problem of computer science can be solved with another layer of indirection, except for having too many layers of indirection".
> I think it's fine to be stuck on a "good enough" standard, if this results in less e-waste and less need to upgrade all accessories simply because the dominant connection port changed.
That’s your opinion. I disagree and I certainly don’t want to see it written into law.
but without writing in law apple will never care about environment right? They are getting money from each connector so why would they? Is it possible to solve such issue without law?
What solution do you propose? If you have solution let us know?
I don’t think that’s entirely fair to Apple: they are trying to not include a charger at all in the first place (just the cable), which does a lot more for the environment than including a charger which you can use with anything as well as forcing the cable to be useful for more than one device.
Good, but not relevant to me defending Apple in this instance; Apple are even doing this (or at least tried to do this) where there not only wasn’t a legal requirement to do so, but a legal prohibition against doing so: https://www.engadget.com/apple-brazil-fine-over-iphone-12-ch...
If citizens care about the environment they will stop buying Apple products. They don’t, hence they don’t care about the environment. Why make laws that go against the citizen wishes?
It's not that they don't care, it's that they are not knowledgeable enough about the issue and don't have time or will to research it further. That's why we have laws and regulations, so that average Joe doesn't have to research the impact of everything he buys on his body/environment.
With that logic you could say, "why ban dangerous levels of pesticides in the food, if people don't like it, they will not buy the product."
Apple recycles huge amounts of materials from old products. I really hope that people are not following your suggestion and estimate the environmental impact only by iPhone cable and connector port.
This could've all been avoided if all manufacturers just followed the previous EU guideline (explicitly not a law) and agreed on a connector. It more or less said "we don't care what you choose, just choose one".
But Apple didn't want to listen and now the EU commission is sick of it and introduces a law. It's the industry's own damn fault that it didn't take the hand that reached out to it.
No, this has to be voted by the parliament like any law, not approved by each member.
> getting this into law has already been in the works for years and years
The goal was to not require a law and make manufacturers agree to a standard without legislation, because that makes it easier to evolve.
Apple is the only one that wouldn't agree to that, so that means it has to become a law apparently, otherwise they won't do anything.
If a new standard appears, I expect the USB-IF to notify the EU while they're working on it so that legislation can evolve in time. The EU parliament is very quick to pass new laws when necessary.
>No, this has to be voted by the parliament like any law, not approved by each member.
Almost all EU legislation needs the approval of the Council of the European Union - which comprises representatives from all 27 member states.
The Ordinary Legislative Procedure goes Commission -> Parliament -> Council -> Adoption. If the Council and Parliament don't immediately agree then there's a step in there for negotiation between all three institutions.
Aaargh20318 is probably wrong that all 27 need to agree, though, most things are decided in Council on the basis of Qualified Majority Voting which does not need all 27 to agree.
We don't know the language to the legislation yet, so I think it's worth withhold judgment for now.
Based on other recent legislation from the EU that I've had to work closely with, I would say the EU legislators are very aware of the pitfalls that come with writing a specific technology into law. They seem to deal with this by writing an initial recommendation, or providing a few concrete examples of how to conform int to the law. But hand off the longer term management to some sort of agency or regulator that already exists, and instructs them to work directly with industry to fine tune the technical aspects.
Taking this approach create a natural escape hatch for new standards being introduced without new law being written. It'll still create a natural dampener on innovation in specific area, but it avoid completely stifling it.
Also on quick FYI, USB-B has never been used on a modern mobile phone. The port is bigger than most phones!
USB C's physical form is likely to remain stable for years to come. There seems to be plenty of room to evolve the cables and device capabilities while retaining physical backwards compatibility.
I mean, USB 4 can already do up to 40 Gbps, and upcoming versions of the standard are said to be going to 80 Gbps[1]
The way it usually works with industry standards is that if the industry agrees that a different connector would be superior, their lobbyists are highly effective at changing the legislation.
Plus, this is such a minor issue. You get a device and the charger for it and that is the end of it. If you buy multiple devices that you carry around with incompatible chargers then you carry (assuming you even need to charge on the road) a couple of cables (or one with multiple connectors). It's about as much of a none issue as you will ever get.
It wasn't a non-issue till the EU stepped in. Every manufacturer had their own plug and some (eg. Nokia) even had more than one, of course they were incompatible. I'm grateful that the EU stepped up here.
I feel for Apple's hurt pride here that they should adopt something they didn't invent, but since we are a mixed Android/Apple household, getting rid of Lightning will be nice.
Precisely. Nokia was blessedly standardised, in fact, because you only ever had 2 charging ports so you could mix and match. Most other manufacturers were a mess with proprietary connectors that weren't barrel jacks.
I live in a mixed Apple and Android house and its a non-issue. If it was an issue, we'd just consolidate our house, but we don't, because -- like you -- we don't find it enough of an issue to care.
Sony had a different charger model (with a different voltage down to tens of volts, or with a different connector) for nearly every single device released.
Want more than one power brick (one for the office and one for the home/vacation home)? Spend a lot of money for the convenience, or carry 2 kilos of chargers wherever you go.
Some devices eschewed power supplies altogether and used cradles. Lose the cradle and the device is unusable. Carry the cradle, and it becomes an extra 500g in your everyday carry.
If you were lucky, your device supported a barrel jack or another generic connector, but you had to carry around a universal power supply with adjustable voltage and polarity because they all used different configurations. Get something wrong, and your expensive device is fried.
I remember the early 2000s and the pre-USB charger era. I don't remember it fondly, because it was frankly stupid. Even the worst universal standard is better than no standard at all. And I say this having lived through the era of Micro USB dominance, an era that has killed the charging ports of many of my phones.
I am surprised we are not seeing more positive sentiment for this among HN members. I had to scroll quite a bit to find this comment.
In the other hand, HN is US-dominated and they don't like regulations over there.
This is absolutely a good regulation, proven by previous similar regulations. I have about a kg of waste cables laying around. We need to start acting smart about how we deal with plastics.
Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a government entity mandating a physical interconnect? I guess it has worked out well enough for receptacles. But on a phone it acts as a data connection as well. I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location? No one is using it anymore, but it is still mandatory on everything.
No, I don't. Here the EU is creating legislation that forces manufacturers to increase interoperability, be more consumer-friendly, and more climate friendly.
This all seems within the remit of governments to me.
> I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location? No one is using it anymore, but it is still mandatory on everything.
Or course not, it's not like legislation is set in stone and will never change.
One nice and welcome example of consumer-friendly legislation, btw: The EU prohibited mobile operators from charging voice and data roaming fees within the EU. So, now on holiday in Spain, say, you can just keep using your mobile contract including free minutes and data. (A typical deal is <10$ a month for unlimited calls, unlimited SMS, and, say, 3 GB data; or 15$ for >10 GB data.)
When traveling outside the EU, it's still best to buy a local SIM to avoid the ludicrous roaming charges, but there's no need to do that within the EU anymore.
Very interesting (or disturbing) in this regard is the UK after Brexit, where one by one the mobile operators are all reintroducing roaming charges now that the relevant EU law no longer applies.
Another consumer-friendly regulation that Brexit has destroyed is the cap on interchange fees (0.2% for consumer debit cards and 0.3% for consumer credit cards).[1]
Only partially true, let's not be misleading. It works for short vacations, that's about it. The EU has a so called "fair use policy", that basically give mobile operators the possibility to charge you more when you're more than xx days out of the country of registration (it's more complicated than this, but it's the idea anyway). In my case, traveling often abroad, means I'm constantly hitting this limit which force me to buy local sim card from time to time. It's nowhere near like in the US if some were thinking at this for comparison.
Yup. And there's exceptions galore too. You can just claim that free roaming will cause "financial hardship" and still get away with charging roaming fees anyway. Nearly every provider in Finland immediately applied the exemption and kept charging roaming fees anyway.
Goddamn 2021 and we're still pretending electrons cost more based on distance.
I renewed five contracts this year, neither of them had the same amount of data for roaming as they did for local. Calls and SMS, they did (unlimited, basically). This seems to be the norm for Orange here. I would assume the same goes for Vodafone since they generally seemed to always offer less for more.
That being said, it's absolutely lovely to be able to travel for business or holiday and to be able to find your way around, purchase things and get access to public transportation information abroad. Roaming costs before that always tended to be so eye-watering that I never really knew anyone who thought they were worth putting up with. I really dislike going outside of the European Union because of them, myself, too.
If memory serves, the amount of roaming data you get is computed on the basis of 'what would you get if you paid roughly the same amount of money to a typical provider in the country where I am travelling', with some caps in both directions.
I live in Italy which has low prices, so I get 50 GB/mo for 8€ (and 200 GB/mo during the summer). Last summer I travelled to Austria and Czechia, I had 4GB available in both countries, and indeed checking their biggest ISPs' landing pages it looks like 8€ wouldn't have bought me even a gig! So 4GB is probably a mandatory minimum.
Thankfully, if you have an eSIM compatible phone, you can use a service like https://www.airalo.com/ to quickly get a local data plan. Let's see if this forces carriers to reduce their roaming fees.
I find it interesting that our main hope for forcing the big tech to follow ethical/environment_friendly/user_friendly procedures is not the US, but the EU.
I'm not European, but can anyone tell me how does the political system in the EU let (or even motivate) law-makers and governments to support such mandates and laws that are in favor of consumers?
The EU is about the internal market, but having an internal market means it's about standards. There should be no technical difference between products from Denmark or Spain.
These rules are developed by the commision, but approved by national governments, which are then 'translated' into national laws.
In some areas the rules are very specific and detailed (eg chemicals) but in others the national governments are still in control (like protected titles such as baristers).
In the end is the motivation money. If you think your usb-c chargers are better than other countries, you would like to force apple to move to USB-C chargers. So it's a big economical incentive, and having countries on board like Germany, Scandinavia or the netherlands, makes the EU more suspicious of large companies, it's in their culture ;).
US has a more liberal policy where they make mistakes very costly, if you can succesfully bring a claim to the responsible party. The european mindset just tries to forbid things (Things aren't allowed if they aren't proven safe, instead of only things proven unsafe being forbidden)
I'm not an expert by any means, but my impression is that, while they certainly still have some influence, lobbyists and big companies hold a lot less sway in European politics than in the US. Part of that may be tighter rules around campaign finance, part of it may be cultural.
There is not really a 'european' government. There is a political body, which is setting some wider rules in the union, but only in areas which have been transferred by national governments.
However, there is a tendency of these national governments to introduce laws on that level, and then turn around to their citizens and tell them 'Bruxelles told us to do this'.
There are certainly some stupid laws on that level, especially in the area of tech. But most of the complaints (these laws are conflicting!) are just a meme.
In general is the support for the EU a majority [1] and the UK only succesfully 'won' the referendum to leave, and are now seeing the difference the EU has made in daily life.
The quotes research is a bit older, I am certain the Covid response and the fallout from Brexit has improved the support for the European union.
Also, the EU government is not hugely popular in the public opinion. Years ago the EU government was popularly known for creating nonsensical rules (and there are indeed examples of nonsensical rules).
To claim their future existence, the EU government really has to prove their usefulness for the EU citizens.
> To claim their future existence, the EU government really has to prove their usefulness for the EU citizens.
A lot of it has to do with the EU government being the punching bag of local politics. Like the German conservatives would throw up their hands "we can't do anything against this nonsensical EU legislation", completely omitting that they are represented in the EU parliament and could've done something against it there.
And the population buys it because the in general the EU population knows less about EU governance than US governance. A shame.
Lots of right wing parties in the EU advocate for a "countryname-exit" and thus lobbyism in the EU has to fight the fear of no-existing very soon. Thus, the government has to fight for the approval of the people every day at gunpoint and thus, good legislation may appear for fear of loosing ones power, job and by that even the lobbyism bribery income.
Also remember, until the day the brexit vote happened, the Brexxit was not possible,not real and not even worth discussing on HN.
Such things might not make waves in the high-tech bubble, but in the real world, such movements might be considerable. Lots of people see globalism as a attack on their life and community by now.
I agree with you on this point. It's worth noting that they are usually the same people who actually push for globalism, every time they choose "cheaper" over "local".
Do they really choose? Wage stagnation is very real- so going for the cheapest, is not really a choice, just a attempt to keep your economic downfall from materializing.
Legislating pricing is something governments can do well. Legislating physical interconnect is an area where they are much more likely to be ignorant of the relevant requirements. I, for one, vastly prefer Lightning to USB-C despite the interoperability; I hope that if the EU goes down this road that Apple makes a Lightning phone for the rest of us.
MUCH easier to connect in the dark, which I do a lot of. My broader point is that government regulators are not product managers / user researchers and shouldn’t get in the business of regulating specific features.
From the perspective of a free and non-monopolistic market, anything from the USB consortium is massively better than an expensive proprietary standard controlled by a single vendor. Technical superiority is not the point.
I would say it’s easily possible to pick a standard that is so subpar compared to a proprietary one that it’s worse for the consumer.
A solution would be to just require any port used to be freely available and open. Require Apple to open the lightning standard and make IP related to it unenforceable.
Apple "complied" by putting USB-A on their chargers and calling it a day. EU authorities grumbled but didn't opt for a lenghty legal challenge; instead, they talked a bit more and came up with this updated legislation. Note how they give Apple something (the unbundled charger) while becoming more restrictive in other areas... if Apple continue taking the piss after this gets passed, I expect the hammer will come down.
So, what are they going to do? Fine Apple for a couple of million euros? Give another reason for Apple to increase the prices of their products even more?
So, it's the latter. They will have another excuse to increase the prices further. "We had to spend $BILLIONS to change the design of the iPhone, so this is why the new iPhone EU Edition is going to be 1400€".
This is the kind of thing that really makes me understand Brexit.
Nobody forces you to buy a consumer-unfriendly product that also happens to be arbitrarily expensive. If somebody in Milan can't afford a Ferrari made in Maranello because the damn company insists in pricing their cars beyond what is reasonable for a 4-wheeled vehicle, it doesn't mean Milan should secede from Italy, surely.
Nobody forces you to buy a consumer-unfriendly product, period. Are you also going to push for governments to force Apple to make iPhones with removable batteries? What about the headphone jack? Why not force Apple to open source their OS? Why not block the sale of any product that is made in a country that has concentration camps?
These are all valid reasons that make me never want to buy an iOS device. But it is my choice.
Why is there this constant need for individuals to delegate their consumer conscience to an ill-informed and corrupt entity?
> "Are you also going to push for governments to force Apple to make iPhones with removable batteries?"
Kinda - I am pushing my government to force Apple to provide spare parts, and give us right to repair. Make ownership of digital device mean something again.
US obsession with choice is a red herring. I don't want sadistic 'choice' between getting going backrupt and dying of a treatable disease, I want the problem fixed.
> Make ownership of digital device mean something again.
Then just go buy from someone who actually is behind these values, and not someone who just greenwashes their products.
> US obsession
Sorry to spoil your ad hominem, but I am born in Brazil and have been living in Germany for 8 years.
> I want the problem fixed.
The problem is fixed already: I've been having this discussion while typing from a fairphone, which I was free to install /e/ OS without any Google services, and it cost less than an iPhone SE. I can open and replace not only the battery, but also the display and the camera.
I didn't have to wait any bureaucrat in Brussels to do this, and quite frankly I believe that if it were up to them they would find a way to screw this small Dutch company out of existence.
Stop buying Apple products. Stop buying anything from any company that is consumer hostile, even if the "ethical" alternatives are more expensive/less adequate for your needs. I can guarantee you this problem (and others that you don't even care about) will be fixed faster than by waiting for the EU.
"The problem is fixed already: I've been having this discussion while typing from a fairphone"
Congratulations, you are part of the 0.1%. and yet every day millions of unrepairable phones go to landfill, petrol cars are still being produced, coal is still being burned.
Maybe enough is enough, democracy is more impirtant than 'free market'. I want to nail the invisible hand to the cross to make a point.
Manufacturers that are interested in catering to that market don't have the capital/resources to compete with Apple on more common customer needs like performance and efficiency. So there's effectively a natural monopoly on high performance mobile devices which allows Apple, and a small number of other brands, to be customer-hostile in other ways.
Are you saying that companies like Motorola/Lenovo, Samsung, LG, Sony, Nokia/HMD, Huawei - who all were producing each a handful of different models at the most different price points, targeting all different market segments - didn't have the resources to build a model with a removable battery?
I am more inclined to believe that they consumers have signaled that removable batteries are not as important as improvements on other constraints like size, durability and material look & feel.
Let me flip the question: if removable batteries and repairability are important to you, why don't you buy a Fairphone?
No, I am saying they don't have the resources to produce phones which are competitive with iPhones on performance. And in the rare cases where a big vendor is able to achieve it, then they inevitably take advantage of that monopolistic position to drop consumer-friendly features like removable batteries, just like Apple. I am saying there is not enough competition at the highest level of performance for market forces to be able to work there.
That is technically not true (Samsung makes their own electronics and their own displays. Flagships from other companies are often based on better specs than Apple's) and completely irrelevant to the point.
> take advantage of that monopolistic position
What monopolistic position?!
> to drop consumer-friendly features like removable batteries
What?! That makes absolutely no sense.
If consumers (as a whole) wanted to have removable batteries, companies would fulfill the demand by producing and marketing those. The fact that the most expensive and premium phones do not have this feature (while a handful of niche companies can offer that at no extra cost) is an indication that the consumer market simply does not care about it.
You are looking at basic supply-and-demand and you are going ass-backwards at it.
It's the entire basis of the argument which I am making. Maybe you are reading past what I am saying if you think it's irrelevant.
> What monopolistic position?!
The position in which they have access to the highest performance hardware.
> If consumers (as a whole) wanted to have removable batteries, companies would fulfill the demand by producing and marketing those.
Customers are more concerned about having the highest performance hardware. That doesn't mean they don't want removable batteries, obviously nobody would be opposed to having a removable battery since it has many advantages and no inherent disadvantages. But the limited selection of vendors which have access to the highest performance hardware don't need to compete with removable batteries because they have something customers want even more, high performance hardware, which cheaper vendors can't compete with due to economics of scale.
If smaller vendors were able to compete in the high performance device space, then perhaps the increased competition would lead to more options for the customer like high performance devices that also have removable batteries. But because of the natural monopoly that exists among the limited number of vendors which can provide high performance devices, they don't have a need to create those options (even though customers would obviously want them).
Yes, your argument that consumers (as a whole) base their choices on performance and technical specs is flawed. Maybe you are concerned about that and most of your peers, but I can bet that the absolute majority of the consumers have other criteria in mind.
Look and feel, for example, would be sacrificed to have removable batteries. Have you seen the Fairphone? It looks like a brick from 2010. It is by far the ugliest phone that I ever had. Do I care about it being ugly? No. But believe it or not, people will not want removable batteries if that means an "uglier" phone, or one that can fall on the floor and get disassembled.
Features always come at a trade-off. If Apple or Samsung wanted to have removable batteries, their phones would have to be larger, or use smaller batteries, certainly they would have different waterproofing ratings, etc. To think that they just don't offer it because they are abusing their monopoly (sic) on high performance hardware (sic) is beyond naive.
This purview that an iPhone is 'consumer unfriendly' is a hint of the arrogance that drives irresponsible legislation.
Literally the most profitable product in history, that 100's of millions of Europeans - including literally probably most of EU government - want so badly they pay a very high price.
'But it's unfriendly!'
No, it's not.
Apple has 100x more credibility than most other parties on what a 'consumer friendly' product might be. Making something work as well as the iPhone is very hard.
Perhaps what you meant is "user friendly". Yes, iPhones are user friendly. No product Apple sells right now, however, is consumer friendly. Not even remotely.
One glance at their history of handling product flaws, repair costs and their tendency to bend the truth until they can't deny the problems anymore will show that very clearly.
But that's not just Apple, it's an industry-wide problem. Apple however have proven themselves to be the grand masters of consumer unfriendly practices.
> Nobody forces you to buy a consumer-unfriendly product that also happens to be arbitrarily expensive.
If anything, Apple's Lightning port (and the 30-pin connector before that) are significantly more consumer-friendly than USB. Where consumers are consumers of Apple products, but still.
In the span of time when Apple only had two connectors, USB went through 3 or 4. USB didn't even have a charging standard until 2012 (the year Lightning was introduced).
A single, monopolistic market would also be "consumer friendly", given those parameters. Obviously we don't want that, do we?
Getting multiple manufacturers to agree on anything is always going to be a challenge and produce some compromises. But it's still better for the market as a whole, which in turn is better for consumers. I look forward to the chance of buying a single, universal charger with great features that will last me decades, from a vendor that may or may not be a phone-manufacturer. Apple would gladly do their worse to stop me from doing that, if they could.
> I look forward to the chance of buying a single, universal charger with great features that will last me decades
I really highly doubt about the decades part. I also highly doubt about the "single charger with great features" because USB has so many optional parts that many manufacturers are unlikely to implement.
If Apple thought they could charge more they would be already doing it, based on their considerable margins. If this makes you understand Brexit I doubt you really understand Brexit.
If you really believe that, I have a bridge to sell you.
The EU, just like any political entity that has grown beyond the original intended responsibilities, has become the stage for cronies and the elites to play their power games.
If the EU was really for "fair markets", Dieselgate alone would have been enough to wipe the German auto industry off the Earth. That is certainly something that has caused more environmental damage and stopped healthier market competition than a fucking power connector.
And don't even get me started on the subsidies given to French farmers and the market quotas for eastern countries that kill any chance for them to develop their industries.
But, hey, at least the EU is giving Apple fans another way to greenwash their consumer behavior, so that counts for something...
"Criminal prosecution for Dieselgate" was political theater of the worst kind. It's an example of systemic and institutional corruption and all that has brought was a couple of scapegoats. If the same thing were to happen in a smaller country, say Poland or Czech Republic, it would be grounds for the bigger EU states to bulldoze the plants and to bankrupt the nations.
Also, it's the second time that you try to counter an argument by throwing an American Whataboutism. Maybe you should let go of the nationalism and find better arguments?
3 - if one is pointing at dieselgate as a failure of EU, there must be a place where such failure doesn't happen. If such a place does not exist, then it's not much of an argument, every system has it's failures. It's not like i am defending WV
Every system has failures. That much is a given. The main issue is about scale of these systems and its failure modes.
The problem of "big" systems - whether the EU, modern day US where federal govt taking over power from the states or Communist China - is that it fails in spectacularly catastrophic ways.
This is why you get crisis like 2008 and Dieselgate. Both are instances of "too big to fail" industries, protected by the government and that in the end screw with the people that they claim to serve and protect.
So it doesn't matter that you are not defending VW, or that you are against Apple. The point is that by backing this ever-growing centralization of power and influence by one single political entity, you make the whole system more fragile and easier to be manipulated by those elites that you so loudly claim to be against.
> there must be a place where such failure doesn't happen.
Switzerland. Local governments rule over any attempt at centralization. Direct democracy. Individual freedom but without forced globalization and universalization of values. Not involved in any wars. NOT AN EU MEMBER STATE.
Ok great you argued the EU is hypocritical when it comes to large local companies.
I still don't see how encouraging competition and interoperability in the smartphone and electronics market is a problem... except for Apple's margins.
If Switzerland is your model, I'm even more confused about how you could be against a liberal economy using protectionist measures against an American company.
They are not encouraging anything. They are just playing a power game to see who can jerk more the other around. In the process, they create costs and bureaucratic obstacles that make it easier for any smaller player to have any chance of entering the market competitively.
> liberal economy using protectionist measures
Because it is a problem with the scale. There is not one economy in the EU states. There are many. By trying to apply a top-level, centralized solution to all member states, it ends up creating sub-optimal solutions for everyone. Or worse, it executes the decisions that benefits the member states with most power: Germany and France.
Systems that are designed bottom-up are more robust, have a more diverse set of tools to solve their problems and fail in more localized, controlled ways. Tell me how many times has Switzerland got into some kind of deep systemic crisis. Now do the same with similarly small countries that are in the EU.
> This is the kind of thing that really makes me understand Brexit.
It seems a tad inconsistent to be against restrictions on imports but also for the kind of fallout that resulted from Brexit. That makes your understanding of Brexit seem incomplete.
And if you don't like price increases on Apple products, don't buy them. That's the only language they understand.
It's not the restrictions on imports that I am against. It is the all-encompassing political bureaucracy that the EU has become and how upside-down its priorities are.
> And if you don't like price increases on Apple products, don't buy them.
I don't buy them already, but the type of connector they use is way down on my list of reasons not to use them. Closed source? Hard to repair? Exploitative app store practices? Spyware that scans your data? An unwilling intermediary into developers and consumers? Greenwashed, overpriced hardware that can only be used by the terms dictated from Cupertino?
Those are reasons to not use Apple. Yet, here we are discussing the most irrelevant feature of their devices like it is the only issue that is wrong with them.
Note how many of the topics you mention as critical are actually discussed at EU level: GDPR, support for FOSS in various programs, ongoing examination of the appstore monopolistic practices, tax-dodging... And chargers too, yes, if anything because it's a pretty simple thing to mandate.
What is "simple to mandate" has not been effectively turned into results even after a decade of "legislation". The rest is nothing but "discussions" or big laws that don't really accomplish anything.
What is the point again? To have "discussions" or to effect change?
I wish I could say something like "keep waiting for the EU to being actually effective, I will be over there with the people that can get stuff done", but the main problem is that the more time passes, the more the EU finds a way to fuck with ordinary citizens and the more we have midwits asking to be supervised, afraid to step outside the lines and pointing out at those that fight the absurdity of it all.
I think Apple is moving in this direction on their own. They sell 4 products that charge by USB-C (Mac, iPad Pro, iPad Air, iPad Mini) and 4 that use lightning (iPhone, iPhone Mini, iPhone Pro, iPad). But it's a gradual change, each of the last few years has seen a product introduced using USB-C.
> They will have another excuse to increase the prices further.
This sounds like a very poorly thought out slippery slope argument, specially taking into account that iPhones' manufacturing cost is already a fraction of the huge price they sell it to consumers (i.e., $200 vs $1200)
At worst, they can block sales across the Union. Somehow I don't think Cook would risk losing their second-largest market on a triviality like this, but who knows.
That's the opposite of compliance. Not only they didn't get to change their own product to match some standard, they went straight against the spirit of the law (add more electronics and yet-another source of waste).
It was still considered a success because it at least reduced the need for proprietary AC adapters. Now it seems they want to expand on that to fix the proprietary cable/dongle issue too.
Without the dongle you couldn't use iPhones with micro-USB AC adapters that don't have detachable cables.
However I agree that besides that specific circumstance, they were basically already compliant. The 2009 initiative wasn't targeting Apple specifically.
It might mean that it won't change as often as through a free market, but laws adapt.
On the other hand, things also become permanent fixtures without law. Like USB-A connectors having been stuck on laptops and desktops for more than 20 years.
>But in the US, I very much view it as once something is legislated it becomes a permanent fixture of our society.
once something is legislated on it is a permanent fixture of society that that thing will be legislated, but that does not mean that legislation, in the U.S as well, is not updated.
The usual way to legislate about this kind of thing is that a legislative body writes down the goals and gives the responsibility over the technical design for a much faster executive body.
But I'm not sure the EU even has an executive body that could receive it. So I'm not sure about how this one is done. Anyway, since this is a revision already, it seems to be adapting reasonably fast.
When it comes to technical details, what happens depends on the actual legislation. There are plenty of technical committees in Bruxelles (in fact, some would say there are too many of those...), but for situations where some trickery in application or enforcement is expected, directives stay light on details and national governments will then get a good degree of freedom in adapting the rules. If a government implements a directive badly, it will eventually be challenged in the European Court of Justice, that will decide if the national rules follow the spirit of the directive.
>Or course not, it's not like legislation is set in stone and *will never change.*
Regulations can be changed, but its not easy.
If this regulation was proposed in 2005, would we even have usb-c? or would the mobile world still be stuck on mini-usb because that is what the EU would have mandated at that time?
I don't want my cell phone designed by an EU committee.
That's the other issue, it feels like the EU committees are composed of grouchy HN readers that want to "fix the world". It feels very much, "if I were king I would do this".
Now apple can announce they support full HDMI from iPhones when in reality it’s because thunderbolt had to do cheap hacks to do it properly. Everyone gets to buy all new dongles and accessories. Apple low-key wants this to happen
The fact is Lightning is so widely used in practice that force deprecating it would drive an awful lot of kit into land fills.
If it was one of the dozen or so variations of little USB with 2% or 3% market share each you'd have a point, but those have mostly gone already.
I don't expect Lightning to be around forever, but then I don't expect USB-C to be around forever either. Some day it will be super-ceded - should be super-ceded.
Apple has shown remarkable consistency and discipline in managing it's connector designs. Far, far more so than any other manufacturer I can think of. They were also at the forefront of adopting USB-C in the first place and spearheaded making it so popular.
Apple could make an iPhone for a few years with usb-C and lightning if they wanted people to be able to use their existing gear, but that doesn't feel very Apple: their laptops jumped right from zero USB-C to zero ports that aren't USB-C.
They might also get some new customers; I was considering an iPhone rather than Android in my last phone purchasing round, but no USB-C means I need different charging, means I don't want to deal with it. No headphone jack is also something I don't want to deal with, been there, lost the dongle, would rather not go there again.
> The fact is Lightning is so widely used in practice that force deprecating it would drive an awful lot of kit into land fills.
An awful lot of kit is already going to landfills due to being rendered useless for depending on non-standard components to work. Personally I had to throw out a couple of phones because their chargers stopped working.
Also, it's not as if lightning-to-USB-C adapters are unheard of.
To top things off, even if we somehow assume that USB-C is unable to meet anyone's needs in a few years, and in the process ignore the fact that USB-A has been meeting all needs for some decades now, why would we jump to the conclusion that whatever port format comes next it will be technically impossible to get it to work with USB-C, or offer it in parallel with USB-C?
The legislation doesn't really do any of those things, and 'cords', like 'plastic straws' are negligible bit of waste - moreover, the legislation probably wouldn't even change the amount of 'cord waste' that much.
The legislation has risk because USBC is ill suited to many things and it's best to let manufactures make that decision.
The EU legislators are a buit lazy on this one: they are legislation what is 'in front of their faces' (i.e. the phones they use) without recognizing the impact might not be what they think.
Now - where there is a non-standard situation (remember A/C adapters?) - then it would actually help for an engineering body to set some kind of standard - but that should probably be a standards body, and not the EU.
As long as manufacturers are using some measure of standardization that would be fine.
A more rational (but difficult) approach would be to figure out a method and system for disposing or recycling the cords.
"Or course not, it's not like legislation is set in stone and will never change."
Government legislation does not keep pace with innovation, it lags it considerably. Not only that, it tends to stagnate. As such it risks becoming a limiting factor and push the dynamism to Asia.
I think requiring the use of standard connectors would be fine, but they mostly already do.
Creating an electronics recycling program would be actually smart, and have positive impact on the environment, but that's hard.
I don’t think anyone is objecting to the motives of the legislation, but rather that it’s unconventional for governments to directly stipulate a technology. Typically they set some parameters that their subjects must comply with. For example, they usually say something like “cars may not emit more than X PPM of carbon monoxide per liter of fuel” rather than “cars shall use technology Y”. It’s not that speculating a technology is outside of the government’s remit, but rather that it’s typically a bad way to make policy (politicians aren’t technologists, governments move slowly, etc).
In the particular case of USB-C, it’s a bit puzzling since it’s not actually an interoperable standard. For example, while the charger shape is the same, I can’t charge my laptop with my phone charger. Maybe the legislation accounts for this, but it’s a bit of a disappointing standard to cement.
> “legislation isn’t set in stone”
I suspect it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to change that legislation than it would be for the market to bring another standard. You might say, “if the Americans have some new fangled charger, the Europeans might demand change from their government”, but it’s pretty unlikely that anyone will invest on a new charger that they won’t be able to sell in Europe. For example, most phone manufacturers are unlikely to make a Euro-only variant, but will rather make a USB-C phone for the whole world, much like how Americans have to suffer through GDPR cookie notifications even though GDPR doesn’t apply to us.
Lastly, is interoperability even a problem? I remember the bad old days before USB and interoperability didn’t really exist because every adapter was proprietary and expensive, but I can’t remember the last time I had an issue. Similarly, are these chargers a major source of e-waste? And how much of that is this legislation going to change? Cords will still wear our and be thrown away whether they are USB-C or Thunderbolt.
They tried the light-touch approach for years (i.e. the previous rulings), and it has improved things but Apple insists in, basically, respecting only the letter of the law and not the spirit - and they are a third of the market. So this time, the Commission came up with a stricter approach.
> it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to change that legislation
The previous attempt is from 2009. A review every 10-15 years or so is not that difficult, when there is widespread political agreement on consumer matters.
> Lastly, is interoperability even a problem?
Before the EU committees stepped in, the market was a jungle of custom adapters. You don't remember the last time you had a problem partially because they forced the market to stop with shenanigans, and most manufacturer complied at least in the most visible sector (phones - stuff like watches is still a jungle, but they are less popular and definitely not as essential as phones). Some convergence was already happening but EU rules accelerated adoption and ensured it would happen across the board. Only Apple insisted in ignoring the spirit of the decision, so this is meant to force their hand somewhat to play ball (while also giving them something, since the unbundled charger was at risk of being challenged as anti-consumer).
> Similarly, are these chargers a major source of e-waste?
Yes.
> And how much of that is this legislation going to change?
And I'm pretty sure you are being fooled by your biases. You want to believe that the EU is necessary for this kind of change to happen, ergo when the change happens (worldwide!) it can only be because of the EU?
- Apple managed to get through all the regulation "mandates" without any serious repercussion to their operations, showing the complete lack of effectiveness of said regulations.
- market conditions and the development timeline of the technology (USB-C with power delivery) can alone explain the gradual change in the Apple product line.
Those are the facts. Now let's go to the opinion part and apply Occam's razor here: between the explanation that requires believing that Apple is changing its products out of fear from EU regulatory bodies (despite historical evidence of the contrary) and the explanation that says changes were bound to happen anyway due to being sensible business, which one is simpler? Which one is more likely to be correct?
> but rather that it’s unconventional for governments to directly stipulate a technology
aren't you forgetting that governments hand out and enforce patents/monopolies/IP?
also it's hard for small groups to compete with giants when those giants have plundered the commons and more and more scientific and technological research is locked up behind their corporate firewalls.
at this point ignoring that plundering is wilful, not due to ignorance. [1]
> aren't you forgetting that governments hand out and enforce patents/monopolies/IP?
In general, "handing out and enforcing monopolies" is a bug in democratic governments, not a feature. So by way of your own analogy, this legislation would be another bug.
> also it's hard for small groups to compete with giants when those giants have plundered the commons and more and more scientific and technological research is locked up behind their corporate firewalls.
I'm already sold on the idea that corporations have too much power and corporations often abuse it. We probably agree here, but I don't think that has anything to do with this case in particular--all of the mainstream connector/power protocols are already open. We're not talking about smaller tech companies being unable to manufacture and sell Lightning chargers (or whatever the tech is called, I've already forgotten).
* Stupid webmasters (you don't need that cookie popup for my session cookie)
* Greedy advertisers (that track me) and greedy web publishers that insist on including such privacy-violating scripts and third-parties on their sites
* Sheep user (that have become so accustomed to cookie popups they now just keep pressing the most colorful button)
Long live uBlock origin and its "annoyances" filters.
I generally agree that the rules were well-intentioned, so now we have seen a bunch of loopholes being exploited (basically dark patterns) so I fully expect the next revision of these rules to come down with improvements that would make the current dark patterns illegal.
I don't believe they should mandate a specific port, but I do believe they should mandate that any nonstandard port must make a show in a court of law that it's on technical merit, rather than creating interoperability problems for it's own sake.
I believe that in general consumer laws should say that companies cannot create interoperability problems for it's own sake and when doing so must have a salient technical reason, whether the reason is so salient is for a court to decide.
But that is a more specific version of my more general view that I believe that any form of crippleware, defined as companies investing time and resources into generating an inferior quality product should be illegal.
Essentially, I believe that companies can only make a worse product from a consumer perspective, if it were cheaper for them to make that product, they must be legally required to not make a product worse except to cut their own production costs.
Researching and producing their own port when an existing port suffices their needs would fall under this.
Just to be clear, power sockets are not standardized in the EU. Italy has different ones (Type L), France as well (Type E), and the UK too (but they are no longer ... you know) ...
If you use a screwdriver or similar to open the socket covers (shove the screwdriver into the earth socket) then you can indeed use a CEE 7/7 in a UK socket.
Well, they are standardized - it's just that the standard (sadly) accepts a substantial number of different plug designs... Some countries did have to adapt when the standard was defined or if they joined after the standard was set. Compared to what we had before, it was a substantial simplification of the landscape, even if it doesn't go all the way to mandate a single plug design.
Non-ancient sockets in Italy are _bipasso_, meaning they accept both the 16 and 10 A variants of the Type L, and the 10A variant is compatible with the Europlug, making it really a non issue. In households you'll also likely find Type-L compatible Schuko (usually) sockets for higher power devices, or even combo sockets that can work as two _bipasso_ or one Schuko.
So in the end standardization ended up working anyway and no one is struggling because of this (also standards about wire gauges made extension cords safe to use)
I guess it depends on how far you want it to go. If electric sockets aren't standard then that creates bottlenecks in infrastructure interchangeability.
To me, I don't see why government has any business in USB. Bluetooth maybe since it takes up the air. But USB? It's bad enough that wall sockets haven't improved. Will we be stuck with USB-C long after its natural EOL?
> It's bad enough that wall sockets haven't improved
There's not much need for that, to be honest, at least not for Continental Europe where the Schuko plug system is dominant. It's reasonably secure against children and offers enough capacity for all household loads, and industrial applications have all converged on the bulky IEC-60309/CEE-17 plugs.
Sometimes, a product is simply "good enough" and does not require further improvements (or alternatively, a better solution exists, but the cost for retrofitting is prohibitively large).
smartphones are critical to living life in most developed countries. it's the same level of utility as electricity at this point. I don't see anything wrong with requiring a standard port.
Legislation is not eternal. When USB-C outlives its usefulness, it can be legislated away in favour of a different standard. Or they could let a standards/industrial body make the binding decision.
> When USB-C outlives its usefulness, it can be legislated away in favour of a different standard.
When USB-C outlives its usefulness there won't be any ready-made standard for the legislation to switch to. Or at least if there is such a standard it won't come from the EU, or any other jurisdiction with similar regulations. Why would anyone develop a new standard for mobile devices when the law says they have to use USB-C? There are more profitable ways to spend the limited R&D budget than designing new ports which you might not ever be allowed to use.
The payoff is huge. Assuming that your connector will be allowed to charge royalties, you can make the money on the fact that literally every phone will be using it once you lobby to update the standard.
Besides that, whichever organization is behind USB is the obvious candidate. A new standard that's backwards compatible with the old one (because that's what consumers are likely after) except for the connector is best made by the org that developed the previous version of it.
Sure, the payoff is huge if you can charge royalties, but so is the risk. You don't want to be the one that spends tons of money to develop a new standard only to have someone else's design chosen. You're also limited in how much real-world testing you can do since you can't market devices with the new connector to the public until the law is changed. And if the government is going to mandate that everyone use a certain kind of port then it ought to be made available royalty-free, which removes the prospect of a huge payoff.
I'd like to see positive clamping (perhaps by means of a mechanical camming action) rather than relying on the springiness of metal contacts, which inevitably degrades over time due to metal fatigue.
Government doesn't regulate the other side of that interconnect. There are dozens of different DC power connectors that go into a two or three prong wall outlet.
And at least in the US I believe the regulations are local building codes
Honestly, what you're describing about the US is one of the worst aspects of the US. It's mostly a remnant of the fact that we started out as a bunch of territories. But it hasn't really been that way for a long time. Alaska and Hawaii don't really count as they are basically just so different from the mainland US.
For example we have this thing called the NEC. It's a private document owned by a private organization. It's named the National Electrical Code. It applies absolutely nowhere. Every single jurisdiction either uses an outdated copy or so heavily amends it that it prevents anything ever resembling standardized electrical construction. Every single electrician must be a total master of his own local "National Electrical Code".
You say that, but USB-A ports are close to 25 years old, and still plenty adequate for a lot of things, from headsets to audio interfaces to keyboard and mice. Devices with USB-A ports are still sold. I wish my MacBook Pro had some good old USB-A ports.
yeah I only ever really see it on printers, and maybe larger external harddrives (although these days I would never buy an external hard drive that needs a power supply, what a hassle)
The FAA approach to something like this would be to incorporate an industry-defined standard by reference (e.g. altimeters "shall meet the standards set forth in SAE Aeronautical Standard AS 392C") which has the benefit of requiring that there be a standard component while leaving it up to an industry group to figure out specifically what that component should be. It's not perfect but in cases like this I think it's a better approach than explicitly requiring a particular technology, and it gives industry the freedom (within the constraints of its standards body) to redefine the standard without overly onerous regulatory machinations. I'll note though that new revisions still have to be incorporated by the regulatory body; they aren't automatic.
The problem is that after years of everyone pulling their own shit we finally have USB C. Yet it seems as if a dozen companies still do their best to remain incompatible in various ways.
No one wants USB C as permanent solution but the alternative hasn't worked out.
USB C is a huge mess. I have at least 3 types of USB c cables. Standard USB C cables, Cables that can charge my MacBook Pro, and cables that can hook my pro to a dock. I understand the differences but try explaining the differences to your parents.
Not soon, now. My MacBook was advertised as being USB4 compliant, since Apple probably feels funny about using the trademarked "Thunderbolt" name now that they don't have Intel chips in their hardware.
USB 4 is mostly Thunderbolt 3 but without Intel determining whether you can use the name. (There's some differences, but most devices seem to use them interchangeably).
> but try explaining the differences to your parents.
Wheh my Boomer parents first got computers as adults, the number of radically different cables with the same connectors (especially DB9 or DB25) on the end was dizzying, as well as the set of different connectors, and remembering what each was for (or attaching tape and labelling whatever wasn’t the most common function with the same combination of connectors) was the norm. That's also been true (though the set of common connectors has evolved) for most Gen-X and early “Oregon Trail generation” Millenials.
“Almost every cable is USB A to USB micro-B and fully interchangeable” was such a narrow slice of time that it's really only going to dominate your parents experience if they were late Millenials or early Gen-Z.
It was far worse with phone chargers before the EU mandated USB, nearly every manufacturer had several different designs across their product lineup, none of which were compatible with each other.
Because the usb-c spec had too much wiggle room. The bad apples will be fleshed out just like they were when usb 1.0 came out. I credit the MacBook and androids for going all usb-c to jumpstart that initiative
Ports types have been converging naturally without government intervention. Even for iPhones, the writing is on the wall for the the lightning connector. It was introduced nearly 10 years ago under different market conditions (no equivalent USB standard existed). Apple is gradually converging on USB-C, MacBooks contain only USB-C ports, the iPad Pro uses USB-C instead of lightning. The rest of the product line can't be far behind given their propensity for simplicity, being able to use one cable for everything fits well with that.
To answer the EU Commission's question, "Are your chargers piling up in a drawer?". No, I have far less chargers than 10 or 15 years ago when my laptop, digital camera, game system, and phone all had different connectors. Now my laptop, game system (Switch), and phone all use USB-C (phone has absorbed the digital camera). My Kindle is microUSB but newer ones are USB-C as well.
I think you greatly underestimate how much of this "natural convergence" happened because of EU influence. See the memorandum of understanding of 2009.
An MoU is not legislation, it's agreement to work together on a common goal. It can be helpful but isn't binding. From the MoU:
"The Signatories retain the right to withdraw from this MoU at any time with immediate effect."
I was demonstrating convergence on USB-C across digital devices. An MoU from 2009 of phone manufacturers agreeing to use microUSB can only partially explain that. Maybe it helped give the idea of USB charging additional momentum. Maybe it would have happened anyway as microUSB was only itself introduced in 2007, and the phone landscape was transitioning to smart phones at this time.
> Ports types have been converging naturally without government intervention.
Agreed, so why bother with government intervention? The benefit is small and the potential long-term costs associated with retarding technological development are high.
(I don't know if you are, but) this is what I find quite weird about Americans: they think it's unfair for the government to regulate a trillion dollar company, but they find nothing wrong when a company treats its platform like fiefdom (i.e. no rights for the users).
You can be banned from Twitter for saying something like "men aren't women", but God forbid we reduce Apple's profits by making them not sell so many dongles.
I think an individual should be prioritized over a company.
That's because Europeans view "freedom" from an individual perspective, it doesn't distinguish who is causing its infringement (e.g. boss, neighbor, government, corporation, etc). Whereas in America "freedom" exclusively means "freedom [from government]."
That's why when Europeans talk about "freedom" from your boss, Americans get confused. In America if you can privatize a thing (no matter how monopolistically) it isn't a "freedom" infringement (e.g. HOAs) because that isn't what the term freedom means there.
That's why corporations run rampant in the US and the citizens continue to pushback on any government attempted intervention because that government intervention is viewed as a freedom-problem but the corporate invasion is not.
Its not strange. However, I do think governments mandating it is an overstep and it should be strange. Then again, I am a voluntaryist living in the US so I'm pretty biased when it comes to government mandates.
I feel like it’s an overstep too. I don’t feel comfortable with bureaucrats determining which technology we should use.
Going to stick my neck out, and some might say this is just a slippery slope fallacy, but should governments mandate choice of programming languages? It would certainly help interoperability and longevity of code - just like with connectors.
Surely there are better ways than mandating a very specific technology.
It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.
This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.
It's definitely not terrible — microUSB was so fragile that people replaced cables a lot more frequently. My point was simply that if you're talking about concrete, the waste is on a completely different timescale — Lightning cables are pretty durable but even a decade is ages in tech while buildings and sidewalks are expected to last an order of magnitude longer without outside damage.
The way I see it, it was the government stepping in where the invisible hand of the market did nothing (or not enough). IMO, that's part of why we pay taxes.
If you look at your house, almost every single piece of cable, pipe or joint, and so on is standardized so that you can connect stuff from different manufacturers and it will fit and not blow up on you. Then the correct ways to connect stuff together are standardized. Then the people who do these things are going through standardized certification.
You don't need to buy different wall sockets to connect up different appliances because the sockets are standardized and your country decided to mandate that all appliances must follow specific rules and choose only from available standardized options when connecting to AC.
See, it is so ubiquitous that you don't think about it.
You don't need to think about it because somebody at some point stepped in and said that it is not ok to have every manufacturer to have their own standard and homeowners to bear the cost of navigating those multiple standards.
>Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a government entity mandating a physical interconnect?
I believe governments mandating interactivity standards is one of the main reason of its existence.
Before we had standards, like ISO on screws and so on mandated by governments, it was chaos.
>But on a phone it acts as a data connection as well.
Precisely, the data communication protocol should be open for anyone being able to interface with those devices without having to pay extortion rates for anything connected to a phone.
The fact that Apple demands 30% of my income if I create a keyboard for a phone because they control the interface is outrageous.
I do, a little, and wouldn't say this is absolutely great. Nevertheless this seemingly proved to do much more good than evil. We would probably still have different power and data cables for every phone model if the EU didn't do this with USB-micro-B (I always wondered how did Apple manage to evade this for so long, even though I actually feel like Lightning and MagSafe are the best connectors phones and notebooks respectively ever had).
Nevertheless I am excited about the rumors Apple is going to bring MagSafe back in the upcoming model of MacBooks. Perhaps they could do the way it's done in HP EliteBook - it can be charged both through a barrel adapter (could be MagSafe in case of Apple) and through USB-C (i.e. by a Thunderbolt dock).
The only flaw of MagSafe I have to acknowledge is their ultra-thin cable is extremely vulnerable and you can't easily put a heat-shrink tube on it because the receptacle is so many times bigger.
I think the expectation is that there will be additional rule changes to adapt to technology advancement. This isn't the sort of rule meant to last forever. The EU also has less of a problem with people being elected that try to prove that government doesn't work by intentionally making it work poorly.
> I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location? No one is using it anymore, but it is still mandatory on everything.
I’ll love, that 20 years from now, I will be able to take a random device from today, buy an universal adapter for USB-C and it’ll just work.
Apple created very profitable side business of licensing its proprietary connector to anyone who wants to create an accessory to iPhones. Uber-strong commercial motivation will never incentivize Apple to do the right thing - which today is switch to USB-C. The amount of electronic trash that this side business generates has a huge tax on the environment, not to mention inconvenience and extra spend for iPhone users.
While government regulation is usually the road to hell paved with good intentions, nothing else will force Apple to do the right thing. So, I guess, we'll have to choose "lesser evil"?
I honestly don't know. On one hand I'd love for a standard used by everyone, but on the other hand I fear it'll limit innovation. What if Apple want to sell a full wireless phone with MagSafe only for instance? What if someone invents something better than USB-C?
I'd like an alternative where manufacturers have to sell their products with USB-C, but they can sell the same product with something else if they want (eg. Apple would sell iPhone xx USB-C, iPhone xx Lightning, iPhone xx MagSafe... but they'd be forced to sell an USB-C variant)
And it the connector had essentially no relation to the voltage or current required by the device so you couldn't tell just by fit alone what was compatible with what. You could easily damage a device with too much voltage. USB-C might be unclear about what the cable and endpoints capabilities are, but it also won't damage anything to connect stuff together without knowing.
It'll be particularly hilarious, if everything on the phone (charging, audio, data) is wireless, but there's a USB-C port to nowhere sticking out one side.
To be fair the arstechnica article clearly calls out that devices with wireless charging won't be covered by the current regulation, though they may be regulated in the future.
> Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a government entity mandating a physical interconnect?
Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a private company forcing users to use a black box physical interconnect; Apple's black box 'lightning' adapter?
Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a government entity mandating interoperability details on every level of the tech stack? See POSIX for an example. I don't think it's strange at all.
The vast majority of people who seem to be finding this strange (and seem to have a misconception that laws don't and cannot adapt to technological progress once passed) appear to be American or (at the very least) have less day to day exposure to EU legislation and the regulatory landscape.
I get the impression there's a rather striking cultural difference in terms of views on regulation and the overall purpose of government's activities.
I personally welcome this proposal - like many others (GDPR, ePrivacy, data roaming) that have come before it it prioritises individuals over the wants of corporations.
Hear me out, I’m an Android guy at heart and I genuinely believe the lightning connector is vastly superior.
I never have lightning connectors fail to seat, nor fall out of a socket while I’m using a device, nor have I ever broken a lightning connector on a device.
These are all seemingly fundamental problems with USB-C. I have had THREE USB-C sockets fail on two phones through normal use, on Pixel and OnePlus devices. I have never had a USB socket of any other type fail on any device, and I’ve had umpteen cellphones since the late 90s. I genuinely baby my electronics.
Almost every USB-C socket after a couple months of use loses its gripping power, whereas the lightning connector on my 2017 iPad I’m writing this on right now is still fantastically grippy. The USB-C on my current phone, a year old Pixel 3A XL is so loose that while mounted to my cars dash, the cable pops out when taking hard turns. The socket is clear of debris, and will do so with a brand new cable. It just has zero holding power left after only a year.
I think the vast majority of people who prefer USB-C are those who haven’t spent a significant amount of time with both. iPhone users who blindly assume the other side is greener, and Android users mocking Apples weird connector.
I've read on forums that if you use a really thin, small metal device, e.g. a sewing needle for example, you'll be able to dig up tons of tiny lint and make the port work like new again. You say yours is free of debris but it's possible you used thicker tools, and didn't manage to dislodge it all.
Maybe they can make a USB-C-1 that fits at the start and then USB-C-2 and USB-C-3 that are microscopically bigger to fit those old and wrinkly connectors?
Wouldn’t that be great?
(Semi-joking, I know some NES games (Konami?) had slightly thicker PCBs that would always work, but at the expense of decreasing the machine’s life overall on every other game). I guess ZIF is the way to go, but hard to fit into small form factors than something slide/brush contractors.)
Can they please mandate replaceable USB-C sockets then because I see a shit load more broken ones than I do lightning connectors. And usually the infernal USB-C things are soldered into the logic board of whatever resulting in damage to that too. Also USB-C sockets are impossible to replace without very specialist tooling.
Really not a big fan of this unless there are some additional constraints on it.
> usually the infernal USB-C things are soldered into the logic board
There is no reason why a USB-C receptacle can't be mounted on an easily-replaceable flex/daughterboard like Apple does it with Lightning.
> Also USB-C sockets are impossible to replace without very specialist tooling.
On the other hand, I can get spare USB-C receptacles from any number of local distributors. I'm not limited to getting an exact matching connector assembly for the specific Apple product that may or may not be out of production.
As a helpful tip, I find that pocket lint will collect in the iPhone lightening port and needs to be cleaned out periodically. A toothpick does the job here.
Replacing a broken cable is far superior to replacing a broken port. In fact I think lightning is designed so that the cable takes the bulk of any stress on the connection.
The article focuses on forcing USB-C ports (popular), but the proposal also unbundles chargers from products like cell phones (unpopular).
Apple and several other vendors already unbundled chargers from their boxes with mixed reception. Will be interesting to see how this proposal is received when people realize it means they’ll be purchasing chargers separately.
I understand why unbundling chargers from devices is unpopular, especially as charging cables move from USB-A to USB-C but honestly its the right call.
I currently have more than a dozen USB-A plugs (wall warts) lying around and who knows how many more I've already thrown away. Not once have I purchased a device that used USB-A and needed to buy a wall wart for it.
I will have to buy a few USB-C wall warts but i wont buy a dozen of them.
What is proprietary about Apples chargers? They sell USB-A and USB-C wall warts, and their devices happily charge on non-Apple chargers. Their laptop chargers are USB-C and have been for some time. I charge my MBP from a Lenovo power brick. The only proprietary part is the lightning connector.
To answer the question, with a usb-c/micro usb cable? No, obviously not. With a Google/Samsung/Anker manufactured wall-wart? Yes! Android "chargers" aren't a thing that I'm aware of with USB-C, just with micro usb, which would be pointless, because the proposed law would make those redundant anyway.
When was the last charger sold with a built in cable? And honestly, why is carrying 2 cables such a hardship? I agree that USB-C would be more convenient, but the bluster that is made every time this "issue" comes up really is over the top. Look at it this way; the argument goes that having Lightning cables produces e-waste. Changing to USB-C will render existing Lighting cables useless, thereby producing significantly more e-waste! At this stage both arguments are redundant.
As to being labelled a 'troll'; the OP made a factually incorrect statement. I questioned, genuinely, other than the cable, what was proprietary about wall-warts and charging bricks currently made by Apple?
Not if the cable is built into the power adapter. But if the power adapter just has a USB-C port, then you can charge it using the cable that comes in the iphone box.
Not really. The biggest claim is that this measure will reduce e-waste, but that’s a red-herring since the e-waste is in the charger not the cable, and chargers are already interchangeable.
… but Apple’s chargers have been USB on the charger side for ages (previously USB-A, currently USB-C). The easy availability of chargers that work with the phones did little to stop the complaints when they were unbundled.
The unpopularity seems a little shortsighted. I have no clue where my Galaxy S's included phone charger is, because using USB-C means I already have a dozen appropriate cables sitting around. I think at the moment I use the charger from my previous laptop to charge it.
It's just a shift in framing. To use a silly example, you don't expect a phone to ship with a generator: an electricity hookup is a general piece of infrastructure that a user can be expected to have.
In a world full of mandated USB-C-compatible devices, having a single commodity cable slots much more cleanly into "infra you're expected to have already" than "hidden tax on buying a new phone" (Apple's strategy)
Unless those transfer data and charge as quickly I dont see that being the case, I mean moreso in the case of actual charging cables. Apple dropped the ball on their magsafe wireless charger by not including a wall plug and charging $40 for something a lot of people couldn’t use. Some of the Amazon reviews are people who think its a counterfeit.
Airdrop transfers data at full wifi speed and I’m sure we could make a universal standard for that. The charging pads go as high as 15 watts right now. I’m certain we will see more improvements in the future.
Yeah and monocultures are generally bad. If they want to
Fix things then invest in open standards and working groups and file some RFCs that compel people to switch. Micro-dictating things aren’t the way if no harm is being done to the public. This is more about convenience.
Before Covid, every booth at every trade show would give you a free wall charger. Some of them were just 1-port 1A 5W throwaway, but also some better stuff, too.
I can't imagine buying a charger together with the phone is a thing. You either lose them nonstop, or you have so many of them you don't need anymore.
Yet I threw away many such throwaway-grade chargers, and use the one that came with my Pixel phone, because it delivers a much faster charge.
If we all shift the buying the wall charger separately, hopefully something can be done about the wide variety of incompatible fast-ish charging systems. Rather than everyone revert to the lowest common standard of a very slow charge.
Isn't slow charging actually better for the phone?
I prefer to slow change even if the phone supports fast charging — I wish it was easier to do by having a setting instead of having to use incompatible charger and/or cable. The stop limit at 80% should also be made available as a setting, too.
Although I think generally a regulation to get a handle on port proliferation can be very helpful and pro-consumer, inevitably consumers will primarily blame phone manufacturers greed as the reason they don’t get a charger in the box anymore.
Clearly these lawmakers don't understand that USBC cables are not readily interchangeable from one device to another. I don't even blame them, the USB foundation made the mother of all marketing blunders with this standard.
Yes. The A4 and A9 (A1 and A19 are ground) are the only pins that transmit power. Putting 20V/5A through the copper is not a problem even for the cheapest cable.
edit: Ok looking at the other reply with the link to the google engineers stuff some have messed up the A5 (configuration channel) pin and thus the negotiation for giving more power fails and just defaults to normal levels that are safe for any device.
Sure the wire can almost certainly handle it, but are the contacts always going to be able to handle 5A? They are very small after all, and not treated very nicely. Not sure how it's handled by the protocol, but I've known cables to get hot due to contact resistance.
That was my initial thought as well. But by forcing more unity in fast-charge protocol variants and by requiring clear information about required/delivered power on the packaging, it seems that they have an answer to this.
Just charged my phone with my laptops Usb-C charger, without any issue. Apart from special features like fast-charge, I'd say compatibility is very good.
I used to work at a company whose products included USB-C ports that only supported cable insertion in a single orientation--if the cable was inserted incorrectly, it would fry the board. Manufacturers have a lot of freedom to cut corners with this standard in all different places, and you better believe that they are going to do that to the greatest possible extent.
Warranty laws in the EU (2 years mandatory) make this less of a problem - eventually a manufacturer must realize they'll make more money doing things right than replacing tons of fried returns.
This particular company simply made USB-C cables with massive overmolded pokeyokes that ensured they could only be inserted in the proper orientation--which works great until some poor bastard comes along and tries to assemble the thing with the cable he brought from home. Oh well, not my problem anymore.
They need to mandate the presence of a physical cable, otherwise Apple will drop the port and move to wireless charging. Wired cable remains important for high-quality audio and secure data transfers. Both WiFi and Bluetooth have a long and storied history of vulnerabilities.
While they are at it, can we please have a dedicated physical cable port for audio? It doesn't have to be TRRS 3.5mm, but it must be possible to have a wired audio/mike connection that is separate from wired power, without power-hungry dongles. e.g. an entire ecosystem of 3rd party audio devices was sidelined by the removal of headphone jacks.
Now that everyone who wants a Bluetooth headset has one, can we go back to the pre-Beats era of optional, high-quality wired audio? It can be restricted to Pro devices, if necessary.
I wonder what % of phone users have actually used a cable to move data to or from their phone in the last couple of years. I have, but I'm a weird nerd who likes to plug in removable storage once every 6 months or so.
The ones who still own their data? If data is money, they can also afford to buy new phones. iXpand USB-Lightning drives are supported by some iOS apps which process large files, e.g. media playback and editing.
There's no need for everything to be lowest-common-denominator. Product management is not statistics, it is aspirational leadership for upward mobility in human values, including but not limited to function, form, and creative power. e.g. a tiny minority of humans create art for millions, yet both can use the same device + accessories, if devices are not neutered.
> The discovered vulnerabilities affect all modern security protocols of Wi-Fi, including the latest WPA3 specification. Even the original security protocol of Wi-Fi, called WEP, is affected. This means that several of the newly discovered design flaws have been part of Wi-Fi since its release in 1997! Fortunately, the design flaws are hard to abuse because doing so requires user interaction or is only possible when using uncommon network settings. As a result, in practice the biggest concern are the programming mistakes in Wi-Fi products since several of them are trivial to exploit.
I do on a daily basis, but I'm a bit of an oddity in that I've strenuously avoided the shift to streaming music. I don't want all the music. To me that's the same as having none of the music. Heck, I don't even want all of my music. I have a set of smart playlists that keep my phone loaded with a mix of less played and less-recently played songs that give me a set of music that changes every day (although it would take me a few weeks of continuous listening to listen to everything on my phone as it is). I've found wifi sync to be flakey enough that I do my daily sync with a cable.
A thin cable is much less waste than a wireless charger, which has a larger surface area and is still an evolving standard, e.g. magnetic docking, so it will be years of generational upgrades. Cables exist today and work much faster.
Should human time spent waiting for phone chargers be a metric for central planning regulation? e.g. what does a 100% speed increase in rapid charging mean for the economy, vs. travelers waiting at an airport or cafe, or running their car to charge their phone?
The laws of physics still apply to wired audio, networking and electricity, no matter how many billions are spent on glitzy ads for wireless.
For the love of God, we do not want a government to be in charge of the innovation. When government declares specifically what technology is mandated then we can be quite certain that there will be no more progress in this area. For example why bother working on a better port than USB-C, if there is this new risk of not being able to even use it.
Agreed, but IF there are going to be government mandates, let those mandates be used to balance the non-transparent power of corporations prioritizing business interests (e.g. selling more wireless headphones) instead of serving a diverse set of customer use cases.
Are dongles for audio actually noticeably more power-hungry than a wired connection?
The device is still a digital audio device, requiring a DAC for output and an ADC for input to connect to your analog headphones and microphone. I don't see why putting the DAC and/or ADC in a dongle would use more power than putting them in the device.
I'd argue that the DAC and/or ADC are best placed as close to the headphones and mic as possible. If I'm using very high quality headphones or mics I'm going to want a very high quality DAC/ADC. If I'm using low quality headphones or mics I'm fine with a lower quality DAC/ADC.
With the DAC/ADC built into the device I'm either limited by the quality the device maker chose or am paying for more than I need.
Sadly, non-iOS devices have way less security, so that's not an option. Spoken as a former user of Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Maemo and Meego. And current owner of Sailfish and Pinephone.
Network effects mean that some apps are only on iOS and Android. Of those two, only iOS has a net-effective security and privacy story, if used without iCloud.
The free market includes feedback from existing users. Microsoft learned that over time. Even Apple does, reversing course on keyboards and touch bar.
Keep wire port is also important for not to use wireless charging. Wireless charging is inefficient, and reduces battery life due to heat so it produces much waste.
Maybe unpopular opinion but I like lightning more than USB-C, it makes more sense to me to have the connective parts of the cable on the outside of it, which gets rid of that little "notch" on the inside of USB-C ports which just seems like it can get bent at any time.
Normal USB A ports have that little notch on the inside too. For all the years I've lived on this planet I've never broken a USB port. USB C is perfectly fine.
The worst part of lightning is how flimsy it feels once it's been worn in.
Plus having the connectors inside with something to line it up seems like a battle hardened design choice now. Unless you're an idiot, you're not gonna break anything.
Fwiw I broke I think more then 10 micro usb cables / ports throughout the time when they were everywhere, it was kind of prone to breaking. Never managed to break a regular usb, mini usb or usb c though. So I don't think proneness to breaking is inherent to this design, but the opposite isn't true either.
I have broken at least two female USB-A ports, with a cable pulled sideways tearing the inside tab off. Luckily, this always was on motherboards that had a spare one just next to it.
In later revisions (at least starting with micro USB, perhaps mini as well), the cable was explicitly designed to be the part prone to breakage, as it's easier to replace.
I wholeheartedly agree. Lightning, as a connecor, is really superior to USB-C : solid, stable, simple and compact.
Too bad Apple didn't wanted to give this one to the USB consortium and we'll now be stuck with USB-C (and don't get me wrong : as much as i love the lightning connector, I vastly prefer a standard connector for everything, so USB-C it'll be).
I also prefer Lightning. The central pin of USB-C being in the device's port rather than the charger seems like a bad idea to me. Lightning is the opposite.
I think it helps against dust getting stuck inside though.
Also, more ports on USB-C make for better "alternate mode" functionality, where some data lanes are re-purposed (with an analog mux) for another use, like displayport, or audio DAC.
So do I, I would have preferred Lightning ports over USB-C. Unfortunately, Apple never plays nice and always has restrictive and money-making standards, so I guess they never tried to pitch it to the USB standards body.
USB-C is a very capable plug system, so I'll be happy if everything converges on this one instead.
I dunno, I seem to go through Lightning charging cables like water, whereas I've never replaced a USB-C charging cable. That may have less to do with the intrinsic properties of the design so much as Apple's unwillingness to build stable cables, but usually I have two or three cables (at home, at the office) which are usually whatever's cheapest, so it seems like it must be intrinsic to the market's ability to produce durable third party cables.
I'm sure mechanical engineers calculated the entry, insertion distance and wiggle room, so that you can't apply any relevant force onto the notch inside.
They always do. These things have mechanical physical standards as well as the electronic/software side.
Micro-USB requires more force because of its 2 teeth underneath, that's made to latch onto the socket. That was a mistake. In comparison, Mini-USB don't have this problem and slides straight similarly to USB-C in that sense.
A lot of thought process goes into this mechanical interaction of male/female plug/sockets.
I design/3d printed a lot of mechanical stuff for hobby for some years now. You can't make stuff work without calculating these tolerances. I am sure professionals who work on standards know/do better than me.
That doesn’t really solve the problem, though. In fact it makes it worse if you have to curry around a wireless charger that is more bulky than the cable it replaces!
That's the theory with all charging, isn't it? But I'm talking about while travelling or all those unexpected circumstances when you find yourself needing a charge when you're not at home.
One night recently, I managed to get locked out of my flat, after midnight, with nothing but my phone in my pocket. On about 15% charge! Thankfully that was enough to book a hotel and buy a lightning cable (and a toothbrush) at a 24-hour convenience store using Apple Pay, enabling me to recharge the phone on the hotel's USB charging sockets. If I'd needed to find a wireless charger I would have been totally screwed!
I suppose wireless chargers will become similarly ubiquitous if they're the only way to charge phones. If you can expect to find wireless charging in every hotel room and every train seat then it's not a problem. But I suspect that's a long way off.
I remember a few Starbucks in London introduced wireless chargers years ago (maybe around 2017 or so?). They've long since disappeared now though. Many UK trains have full 230V outlets under the seats now so you can charge your laptop, not just your phone!
I travel a significant amount of times, sometimes for work, mostly for leisure. Nowadays I carry one single 65w USB-C charger, it charges: my work laptop (if travelling for work), my personal laptop, my phone, my book, my NC headphones for the airplane, my TWS earbuds. I only own two chargeable items that it doesn't charge: my watch (which I charge with the reverse wireless charging my phone does so I still don't need to carry a charger) and my car (lost cause, obviously usb-c will never replace CCS).
Could they do this given current or near-future technology? My understanding is wireless charging is ~30% less efficient then using a cable, and degrades the battery more. I'm not sure it'd be much of an environmental win to have to use more energy/replace batteries more often (although perhaps Apple would see it as replacing lightning revenue with battery replacement revenue)
You think Apple cares about environmentalism? If anything, Apple is the king of green-washing and being anti-environment. Just take a peek at the gargantuan amount of e-waste Apple is producing year after year with their device-repair policies (= "buy a new one, we can't repair it, sorry. oh and third party repair are terrorists that steal your data and money. just buy a new one, willya?").
Apple cares about one thing only, and that is market capitalization and profits.
Sadly, this doesn't seem like it'll ban Apple from removing the port from iPhones:
> - harmonise the charging interface for mobile phones and similar categories or classes of radio
equipment (tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles
and portable speakers) that are recharged via a wired charging
The EU needs to get in front of this, because forcing all iPhone users to use a bigger, heavier charging puck, waste 50% more electricity, and be unable to transfer files quickly to or from the iPhone, seems utterly unacceptable to me.
I can see the good and bad in this. But as of right now USB C looks like the future with both the amount of power it can deliver as a port, as well as speed in terms of Thunderbolt 4, plus thunderbolt 4 will open up to not just intel if I understand correctly. Every single device in my house now uses USB C. From phone, laptop, tablet, to keyboard, air monitor, even my flashlights charge via USB C.
Actually Apple is moving a way from USB-C-only charger on the next gen laptops, because it does not provide enough power(to get even better charging speed). (Physical size limits that) So, maybe for phones it is enough in the future, but not for all devices.
Yeah I don't know where you're getting this info. The most an Apple laptop pulls right now is 100w because the intel chip pulls a ton of power. 240w in lab testing now. And with Apple chips they are going to sip power. Unless Apple puts a 6900XT into a laptop they won't be hitting that charging limit.
Especially the 16 inc Macbooks can go over that consumption.
But however the main point is in charging, you need a lot more watts to charge faster, as the batteries are getting bigger and if you want to improve existing charging speeds.
Is anyone actually selling devices that can output or consume that yet? IIRC the updated standard was only made public a few months ago.
I know some off-spec devices (some XPS laptops for instance) can shovel 130W around where 100W is the usual maximum but I don't remember hearing of any that make use of more.
There is another option without that standard too: you could always draw from more than one source. Many USB connected DVD writing devices did (probably still do if not using USB-C) this, so they could be used to write reliably at full speed if the host PC couldn't give more than the lower power standards down a USB port (with higher power support you only need one connection, with legacy ports one connector was data+power the other just power).
None of them have hit the market yet, indeed. But it's still not an issue for Apple, adding a 48V mode to their USB PD controller is trivial.
Drawing from multiple ports is a good idea! But if you're MacGyvering something, it's much easier to connect the right resistor to the USB C connector and solder the power lines right into a 48V PSU.
> Physical size limits current, not voltage, and you can increase voltage.
Exactly, you need to increase both for better charging speeds. 240W is not a lot for charging if the battery sizes keep growing. To add, increasing only voltage is not good for battery and gets challenging.
But battery sizes are not growing anymore. The latest macbooks have under 60Wh batteries.
Also it's very wrong that voltage is bad for batteries. The voltage going through the cable is transformed down to the exact voltage that the battery charge controller decides is appropriate for the charge of the battery at any given moment.
If you really wanted even more power, which you don't really, there's no reason you couldn't go to 60V.
If they continue to avoid the widely-used standard, they reduce the likelihood a consumer will buy their overpriced first-party peripherals. This hardly even counts as nefarious: it's openly their brand to dismiss the benefits to the user of interoperability.
What you do to avoid that is legislate it for a limited time (lets say ~5-10 years) and then not renew it. This forces everyone to move to the standard in the medium term and doesn't impose long-term restrictions to new, better formats coming along.
Bad move, an unforced error. This will stifle innovation needlessly, similarly to how US' (previously) mandated single model of sealed beam headlights stifled their automobile headlights innovation for several decades.
Seems some bureaucrat has dusted off the bad old "Everything that can be invented has been invented." quote.
The only possible upside would be manufacturers standardizing on wireless charging in all devices just to avoid this limitation.
For reference: sealed-beam headlamps were introduced in 1939, becoming standard equipment across all American-market vehicles starting in 1940 and remaining the only type allowed for almost four and a half decades, until the 1984 model year. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_aluminized_reflector...
Do we have any room left for innovation in charging ports? USB-C provides 24 pins, up to 240W Power Delivery (negotiable), up to 40 Gbit/s, ability to negotiate alternate modes (so manufacturer can implement new proprietary protocol if they want/need to and put basically anything over those 24 pins).
>Do we have any room left for innovation in charging ports?
Absolutely!
The sheer amount of optional features in USB-C cables makes charging - in particular fast charging, and charging tablet/laptop sized devices - a hit-or-miss game.
USB-C's design was made to balance of costs with regards to client device complexity: 12 pins in total, three twisted pair signalling pathways, of which two are optional. All this is because both of need for backwards compatibility, and also current limitations on low-power, low-cost USB devices that need compat back to USB 1.1. Two thirds could conceivably be done away, using two pins for power and two for singalling. On a large volume production, a smaller number of pins pays off in costs - once Super Speed-grade transceivers are cheap enough for all devices. Alternatively, once optical interconnect becomes cheap enough, we could return to that technology - two power pins & one optical connector. For example Thunderbolt originally started out as optical connector [1], and was only later shifted to copper due to still costly technology.
A phone would also benefit from a contact connector similar to Apple's magsafes (attached via magnets) rather than insertion plug; both due to mechanical concerns and also savings on internal space. That we are stuck with plugs and sockets is largely artifact of requirements for uses other than charging, including pendrives & other USB dongles.
Lastly, a clear directionality hint to charging cables would be good: if you connect a phone to a tablet, which should charge which? Some sort of marking or indicator for the (rare) ambiguous case would be nice.
> Alternatively, once optical interconnect becomes cheap enough, we could return to that technology - two power pins & one optical connector.
Why would we need to? Smartphones don't even use USB 3.0, because smartphone can't realistically saturate 480 Mbit/s of USB 2.0. Of course, power of smartphones will increase over time, but, assuming current speed of progress in technology, we won't exceed USB4 speeds (40Gbit/s) before 2040.
> A phone would also benefit from a contact connector similar to Apple's magsafes (attached via magnets) rather than insertion plug
Magnetic cables already exist and aren't really popular.
> savings on internal space
USB-C port is 8.4mm2.6mm6.65mm = 145mm^3 = 0.000145L. Volumetric density of modern batteries is around 210 Watt-hours/liter, so, with saved space, you can store 0.03 Wh. It's 6 mAh at 5V.
Though, connectors based on magnetic pins are easier to waterproof (but it's still possible with USB-C).
> That we are stuck with plugs and sockets is largely artifact of requirements for uses other than charging, including pendrives & other USB dongles.
These things aren't going anywhere.
> Lastly, a clear directionality hint to charging cables would be good: if you connect a phone to a tablet, which should charge which?
None should charge other by default. User should be able to decide directionality of charging.
> there was some legislation forcing that unification as well.
FWIW there was not.
There was the threat of legislation, which led to an MoU, and the EC expressed satisfaction with the results. In fact multiple manufacturers effectively reconducted the MoU unrequired (but probably to show good faith and further mitigate the risk of legislative action)
Not really comparable. Apple could both innovate and comply by having two charging ports, one EU approved and one Lightning. Come to think of it, I would love a phone like that — maybe government intervention can force innovation.
Would it be possible for EU to select a standard, and request each member state to tax non-standard products sold at an increasing YOY rate. This would give some time to Apple to figure it out while putting the words in action now without punishing consumers from day one. Also, making some money on the back of a GAFA.
There is a time to figure it out. The whole thing is discussed for years. Apple must have seen it coming. In addition the legaslative process isn't finished, yet. And then the final legislative measure will have a grace period and only affect new products.
We are not going to be stuck with usb c for decades. Good grief. If a significantly better technology comes along that requires a new connector I am sure new legislation can make way for it. That said I don't support laws like this. I don't like laws that limit possibilities for consumers. I prefer laws that expand them like right-to-repair and network neutrality when it comes to tech.
I feel like there's bigger fish to fry. There's more and more li-ion appliances and tools, most with proprietary chargers (think all the power tools), and in many cases no user replaceable battery packs (e.g. vacuum cleaners).
It really sucks that I need a new charger + battery if I want to use some bosch or dewalt tool instead of a ryobi or whatever I happen to have. And I can't use these tools' batteries to power USB devices..
I'm sure all these electric vacuum cleaners are a big lump of e-waste when the battery inevitably dies.
Phones have standardized pretty well. Apple is an outlier but I don't think that's a huge deal, and the cost of forcing them (and their users) to switch may be worse than the status quo.
I think that's a lot harder problem, since there's a wide variety of needs that general batteries will have, vs smartphone chargers (and not even smartphone batteries)
There are some hard parts (e.g. I don't expect mechanical compatibility across appliances anytime soon) and easy parts (charging). There's really nothing fancy about the chargers that all the appliances use.
USB PD isn't designed for smartphone batteries, it can power lots of things, including laptops, monitors, soldering irons, large power banks. Appliances' batteries are hardly any different from a power bank. There is no "battery smarts" in the charger itself, it just gives juice to a charge controller located by the battery. I don't know if it scales enough to be usable for 48V appliances, but a lot of stuff could be powered by a common interface (and, conversely, most large batteries could easily double as a power bank, and they indeed do if you just attach the right electronics downstream of it; having this built-in would be an interesting step).
1) legislation forces a standard upon every device maker. Because technology advances all the time legislation will have to change the port every ~10 years. This might happen or not, potentially forcing device makers into building obsolete tech into their devices.
2) make a law which forces device makers to hold regular meetings/whatever to decide upon themselves which port they want to use. The port that gets 51% or more of the votes becomes the standard. If two consecutive rounds of voting can’t find a standard legislation will decide the standard.
I can think of many more ways, one of which being to just let companies decide which port to use without enforced coordination.
I think it's way more likely for new port technology to advance if a OEM can immediately put it in their next product to validate it in the market than waiting for coordination.
If someone designs a new port that is way better, how will they convince other manufacturers at the regular meeting that this should be the new one if it's not even tested in the market?
What you're proposing are two "design by committee" ways of handling this and making it look like there's no other way to handle this or that the status quo isn't better than the proposed changes.
I can think of other ways too, but the EU wants to regulate this part of the economy and i believe they will take way too much time to adopt new standards or simply ignore new ones. Making USB-C the port for decades and stopping any advance in technology here.
Your second scenario is basically what happened: the EU MOU gave the industry a decade, they came up with USB C in 2014, and here we are with most of the industry using USB C and legislation pushing Apple to adopt it.
This is good as it will end up an example of what a government product looks like. Soon outdated and inadequate, and the only thing available--infinite wisdom, stifling innovation.
Sounds like a good idea, but probably not. However, this also looks like a "problem" they feel capable of solving, so that makes the idea more attractive when their world is littered with real, difficult problems yet unaddressed.
Have they figured out how a mere mortal can tell what a USB cable can do without plugging it in? Because USB might be one of the most confusing standards there is.
And I don't believe for a second that making all USB-C cables capable of everything in the standard isn't massively wasteful itself. If the intent is to cut down on waste then that would miss the mark.
I'm also curious about this. 99% of Ethernet cables i've come across had "CAT5e" (or another cat) spelled out on the cable's coat, and that proved useful. With USB, on the other hand...
I went through such a transition with my iPad Pro: from Lighting port (like my iPhone) to USB-C. The result was subjectively worse: the USB-C port is harder to insert into as the margins are straight and "catch", while the Lighting port had a slight bevel, making insertion as smooth as butter.
The fit is not perfect and touching the inserted cable moves it slightly inside the port. The Lightning connection was rock solid in comparison.
The USB-C port is also a male port hidden in a female one. Because of that dirt accumulates around the little knob inside which the limited space makes it much harder to clean than the Lightning port.
Finally, I had to purchase separate chargers and cables instead of the ones I already had.
Not as bad as micro-USB though. That always takes me 3 tries (one on each side then again on the original side) after which I have to look at the damn connector and try for a 4th time.
I do actually agree with these points, lightning is the better connector, but it's proprietary and the other one is a widely used standard, so what are ya gonna do
The big deal about is not so much the choice of USB-C, but the fact that manufacturers will be required to have at least one compatible charging/communication connector. Quoting from the OP:
> Manufacturers will also be forced to make their fast-charging standards interoperable, and to provide information to customers about what charging standards their device supports. Under the proposal, customers will be able to buy new devices without an included charger.
Vendors would continue to have the option of adding proprietary connectors, so long as consumers also have the option to use a standard connector. Consumers would have more choice. That sounds like a great idea to me.
Great news but needs serious enforcement and vigilance against various tricks that manufacturers might employ to "encourage" users to buy their own charger. Example: if a phone sets a lower charging current when it is not connected to the same-brand charger, no matter if that charger can source the necessary current, that would trick the user in believing the original charger is better by shorting the charging time, so the user would be lured into buying one, and we could end up in a even worse situation in which for most people a product and its charger would come in two packages and two shipments.
> Today’s proposals from the EU only cover wired charging and don’t seek to enforce rules on wireless charging just yet. A spokesperson for the Commission has confirmed to The Verge that if a device charges only wirelessly, then there is no requirement to integrate a USB-C charging port.
It was, and quite a success, and probably encouraged the current step.
It changed a problem from "find the right charger" to "will this charger charge this phone quickly or slowly?" with hardly any problems. Someone will post a link to that Google engineer who tested cables, and there was a manufacturer who supplied non-USB power via a USB plug (can't remember which voltage but it wasn't 5V1A), but on the whole, a great improvement over the old state.
Somehow my 25W USB-PD original genuine Samsung charger doesn't charge my 2021 iPad Pro which normally uses a 20W USB-C charger...it just makes no sense.
Sure. I too have a device that "won't" charge from a particular charger. The device and that charger negotiate some ridiculously low effect, and the device turns on its screen while charging. The net effect is awfully close to zero, sometimes it's negative.
But compare it to the mess phone chargers were in 2005.
This might be a naive question but couldn't they just mandate something like 'the latest and or most appropriate revision of the USB standard for the use case' within reason and have that include potential future updates as well, making the law at least mostly future-proof instead of having to wait for politics to catch up with technology?
That's marginally useful, but if the aim is indeed to reduce waste then the key measure would be to stop bundling chargers with phones, as also suggested by the article.
What creates waste is that every time people buy a new phone they get a new charger, which they don't need in 99% of cases because they already have a box full of them.
I expect that this is a battle that Apple will lose. But I don't think they really care that much - because there is neither business or technical justification for a custom connector. Now they can focus on highlighting why their AC converters are superior - which generally they are.
I expect this is a battle that Apple isn't even trying to fight: they just released an USB-C iPad, and next year marks the 10th anniversary of Lightning.
The dock connector lasted ~10 years (it was first made available in 2003, lightning was released in 2012, the 30pin stopped being produced in 2014 outside of India).
> I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location?
Yet another indicator that all regulation like this should come with a time limit. For another popular example, see the whole South Korea Internet Explorer fiasco.
I don’t get it. Is this about chargers or charging cables? All news sites seem to be conflating both. What phone maker today ships a charger not with a USB (A or C) female connector therefore compatible with pretty much any other phone?
Even though as a user i’d love to use same charger and all — as a thinking man I realize that law people dictating technical decisions is something deeply wrong, dangerous and anti democratical phenomena :(
I don't know the timelines for these things, but how would this work if someone wanted to introduce a hypothetical USB-D? They'd just need to petition the EU once a new standard was adopted?
I can only say I really, really hope this substantially slows down the introduction of new ports and connectors. USB-C is a n overly complicated clusterfuck, but it'll do for the vast majority of applications for a very long time.
Much less efficient, so not a good environmental strategy which is the key thing this is aiming at (reducing electronic waste as people throw out old chargers with old devices). Also, for the same efficiency reason, best charging speed is not as fast at least with current tech.
Furthermore, wireless charging standards are much more in-flux than USB-C ATM and might be for some time.
Im not a fan of the quick charging standard being forced as it sounds like it will be one hell of a step back for anybody on a oneplus/oppo phone. The quick charging there is absolutely amazing. Im on an older version but even then my 1+ 7 pro charges fast and never gets hot while charging. Compared to PD or QC it is leagues better.
OnePlus 9 Pro (and previous 7 Pro) owner chiming in. OnePlus was quick to market with good fast charging but it's not all that special these days. You'd never be able to practically tell if my phone used QC 5 or Warp Charge 65T for instance.
But that note aside QC/Warp Charge/<marketing gibberish name here> is just out of specced USB PD and most (including OnePlus) have already moved to supporting in spec USB PD on top of their proprietary modifications. The law is written to support your use case:
"2. Hand-held mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, in so far as they are capable of being recharged via wired charging at voltages higher than 5 volts or currents higher than 3 amperes or powers higher than 15 watts, shall:
(a) incorporate the USB Power Delivery, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021 ‘Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power - Part 1-2: Common components - USB Power Delivery specification’;
(b) ensure that any additional charging protocol allows the full functionality of the USB Power Delivery referred to in point (a)."
and because the law doesn't allow bundling chargers anymore you're free to pick whether you want to use a standard USB PD charger (which the device must support) or buy the manufacturer's proprietary charger (which the device can optionally support).
Did they finally get rid of the can't charge very fast while the screen is on and gets hot enough to cook eggs while charging issues with QC5? Because at least with QC3 and previous that was a major issue.
IMO, that charger should be Qi. Ever since trying wireless charging on my Nexus 4 back in late 2012/early 2013 I just can't go back to sticking a cable into my smartphone just to charge it. Makes me feel dirty.
So this will be the end of any charging port technology, what would they have selected pre iPhone I wonder? As usual the government knows best when figuring out what a consumer wants or needs.
This is silly. Apple's just going to add a $5 converter to their boxes that no one is going to use. They will also sell the converter for $75 just in case you do use it and lose it.
> Unbundling the sale of a charger from the sale of the electronic device: consumers will be able to purchase a new electronic device without a new charger.
> the EU is in favor of having a single charger for all popular gadgets in order to cut down on the environmental impact as well as make it easy for consumers to carry just a single charger for all their gadgets instead of using different proprietary connectors
Why is this so important to the EU? The stated purposes of this proposal are to reduce e-waste and improve consumer convenience, but it's easily argued that the actual impact of the proposal is the exact opposite.
iPhone users who buy new models with USB-C would have to replace any old stuff that uses the lightning connector. All this proposal would do is force a bunch of stuff to become obsolete.
How would it significantly reduce ewaste? Most phones - including the iPhone - come with a cable that connects to a USB-A or USB-C port. I guess it would reduce the amount of male lightning to female USB-C dongles manufactured, but that seems pretty inconsequential.
But what's the gain? People will buy just as much electronic crap. It will just have USB-C ports instead of lightning ports.
And it's not like USB 3.1 Type C will be the top end forever. People will still replace their old stuff whenever the next USB spec lands or some fancy new connector is released. It wasn't long ago that Micro USB 2.X was standard.
It seems to me thr EU is very good at making plans without considering second and 3rd order consequences.
This seems like a good idea on the surface but look at the shit-show that the cookie/data regs have created on the web today.
I hope whatever law they write is encompassing enough that we don’t get the equivalent of horrible workarounds - maybe apple just stops having a cable and we all have to buy MagSafe now…..
It makes me uneasy to have governments mandate technical implementations like this. Would USB-C ever have been invented if all companies were required to use USB micro-B for everything?
Maybe I'm jaded by my American government, but I have zero faith in the ability of a group of politicians to stay up to date with technical standards and keep legislation like this up to date.
Micro USB became ubiquitous because Europe put forth a commission in 2009 to make it so. Before that every phone had their own weird charger. It was hell. Life got much better after 2009.
Guess who didn't participate? Apple. Because they weren't forced to. This time, they are, and life will get much better.
On American government, yea, it's hard to trust something that is bought and paid for by corporate America, Europe however has some balls in that department.
Yeah, odd to me that people point to microUSB as a victory. That connector is absolutely terrible! I’ve had to fix microUSB ports multiple times. It’s super fragile.
It might not surprise you, but there is a wing of politics where their goal is to make government as dysfunctional as possible to drag everyone towards a certain political ideal they have.
I already have a common charger. In fact I have three! They are all USB-C Power Delivery devices: small lightweight charger, large powerful charger, and a battery pack.
I also have special cables for different devices, but it’s hardly onerous.
Please go back and rewrite your cookie law to be implemented in HTTP / some wire protocol so that I can use browser whitelisting.
A bridge too far, dictating terms they don't understand.
1) Manufacturers don't use USB-C in some cases because it takes up a lot of space. The point being, you can't dictate at this level of design.
2) 'Connectors' are like 'sraws' - they don't take up landfill. They are negligible waste item.
These are things that legislators think of 'because it's in front of them' i.e. they literally see these things every day, instead of thinking more deliberately about both waste and products.
1) Requirement to use a 'standard connector' would be appropriate, but they all do now. Or rather, lightning is not standard, the EU could encourage the open sourcing of it.
2) Some efforts to recycle all electronics would be interesting as well. Cords could be sold with a $1 'recycle markup' that goes to the recycler or something like that - this, along with other bits of operational impetus, might make an appreciable dent.
This is non-news, this has already been the case since 2009 [1]. It mandates micro USB, EU iPhones come with an adapter. I'm not sure what the current status is, USB-C phones don't come with an adapter.
I don't know if it's what the author of this comment meant, but iphone chargers have an USB plug and the charging cable is a USB - Lightning cable.
But it's the case everywhere no?
It might differ per country. In NL it has been the case. The latest comes with an USB-C -> lightning cable [1]. I think the micro-USB might have been around iPhone 7 era.
Am I the only one who thinks this is completely insane, just based on principle? How have we reached a point where we think it is OK for the government to tell me that I can't buy a phone without a specific charger. This isn't a safety issue, and there isn't any massive infrastructure requirement, let people make their own decisions.
If I want to make a crazy phone that is 2mm thin and needs some special charger, I shouldn't be banned by the government from doing so. And if I have some charging port that I think is better than USB-C, I shouldn't have to lobby the government to get it implemented.
Right now new phones either have lightning, or USB-C. Seems pretty reasonable to me. USB-C is not faultless - imagine if we had been stuck with micro-USB instead.
How about the government leaves us alone and lets us make our own decisions. I think that would be nice. Just make people pay for their externalities.
Hopefully in practice, all this means is that Apple will include a lightning to USB-C converter in the box.
"The proposals only cover devices using wired, not wireless, chargers, EU commissioner Thierry Breton said in a press conference, adding that “there is plenty of room for innovation on wireless.”"
This quote typifies why Europe is miles behind on tech and innovation more generally.
"I can't imagine a better way of doing this, so we should mandate that everyone does this way."
We would've never even got wireless charging with this logic back in the USB-A days.
- Wired charging is now a pretty well known topic, and USB-C is considered a good standard by the vast majority of the industry. So let's make sure that everyone uses this standard to simplify the life of the users.
- Wireless charging is still a hot topic, with no clear winner, there is time for the industry to settle on a semi-standard. We'll wait until then to see if a legislation is required.
.jpg#/media/File:USB-3.0-Stecker_(Typ_B).jpg){kind=link}
https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/r...
1. Impact assessment study: common chargers of portable devices (December 2019)
PDF: https://op.europa.eu/o/opportal-service/download-handler?ide...
2. Impact assessment study: unbundling of chargers for mobile phones and similar devices (June 2021) - to identify different regulatory and non-regulatory policy options to achieve unbundling and address the technical pre-conditions and consequences of unbundling
PDF: https://op.europa.eu/o/opportal-service/download-handler?ide...
3. Technical supporting study: wireless charging technologies used for mobile phones and similar devices (April 2021) - to analyse and update on the status of wireless charging technologies
PDF: https://op.europa.eu/o/opportal-service/download-handler?ide...