The USB-C cable/charger landscape is crazy and there are a lot of dodgy devices out there. The conservative approach is to only allow the minimum allowed power with unknown cables/chargers.
The EU mandate is to avoid having extraneous chargers that can't be used with multiple devices. I don't think there is a mandate for specific rates of charging.
[1] https://www.engadget.com/2016-02-03-benson-leung-chromebook-...?
Doing it on iPhone just seems like an abuse of their oversized power in the smartphone industry.
If you're running low on power for your laptop, you probably have your own charger available to you. It either came with the computer, or you likely bought it to use with the computer. Regardless, your charging mechanism here is probably more trusted.
Honestly, if Apple comes out with iPhones with USB-C ports (like we all expect), some charge from a random cable is better than risky levels of high-power charging. This would be a pragmatic choice.
If you want to blame anyone in this, blame USB-IF. They are the reason we have this mess to begin with.
Apple is stuck here. You're right that they are an oversized power in the phone industry. They are going to get sued either way. You'll either have phones that get bricked because of a low quality cable/charger or people will be mad that their current charger won't work at 20A. Either way, they will get sued over something. At least this way, if they eventually have to relent to allow, they'll have cover for if/when phones get bricked from cheap cables/chargers.
To me, this would make more sense from a defensive liability point of view as opposed to an effort to still extract money with the MFi program.
> You'll either have phones that get bricked because of a low quality cable/charger or people will be mad that their current charger won't work at 20A.
This just isn't a real problem. People's phones don't get bricked like this. USB & USB-PD in particular (required for >15W) has very real safety guards, that have worked very well. The compliance testing is more about getting full speed charges. People aren't mad in Android world because their phone isn't charging at max speed- they understand there's different charge rates.
IPhone users already face this second situation anyways: if you just buy a random certified lightning cable & charger, it's not going to charge your 20W+ IPhone at max speed, and might even potentially drain while charging. Same thing goes for all this complaining about bad cables. Any cable becomes bad over time, Apple cables included. Plenty of frayed busted old lightning cables are in use right now, and there's incredibly little real world impact for this; it all mostly works and people mostly get that their cable isn't quite in good condition, and if it's working less optimally, they get it. This idea that Apple is some magical cure-all is an absurd fantasy.
Apple isn't stuck, the people defending Apple are stuck, inside Castle Apple, and they are too scared to look out over the parapets & see that it's actually a nice day outside.
The whole discussion makes no sense whatsoever because Android phones have been dominant in Europe forever. They all use usb-c and the apocalypse didn’t happen. It’s just HN being its usual self and ignoring reality.
If they had some method of doing that, would the expense of operating it be a "money-grab"?
Also, what about all the iPads and MacBooks that have been using USB-C for years? Does Apple not care about those products’ users? If it was concerned about the impact of uncertified USB-C cables, why doesn’t it already do these things on existing USB-C products it sells?
2. They definitely should. I've had plenty of experiences in the past seven years where cords kinda-sorta-not-always worked. If I plugged a shitty cord that didn't work into any device I own, I'd like it to respond "nah dude"
That is misbehavior from Apple, because it adds a cost to the consumer. MiFi is absolutely not free.
The consumer friendly option is allowing the use of a perfectly good USB-C cable (from J5 Create, for example) that doesn't have the MiFi tax without artificial restrictions.
The only thing being codified here is that if you happen to use a janky cable Apple didn't certify, the results are on you.
All that, to my mind, is totally reasonable. You can use a certified cable. You can use a non certified cable. The consumer is totally free to make any choice s/he chooses. They only warrant that if you use the certified cable, your phone won't blow up.
> Shrimp states that Apple will limit data and charging speed for cables connected to iPhone without the MFi certification.
To me (and I'd wager it's the same for most folks), that's Apple implementing a technical block on the cables separate from their actual capabilities.
With respect to the cables, that's part of the USB C spec. Not the spec to which you are referring.
The whole point of the E Mark is to signal that it is safe to send otherwise dangerously high speeds and wattage down the cable. So they're just saying that they promise to follow the spec for cables they certify.
Now the accessories, you're right, but I don't know the rules for accessories. I do know them for the cables.
Remember, a USB-C cable not just a bunch of wires hooking two connectors together. It's two SOCs which negotiate the cable's capabilities with the devices on either end before allowing the flow of power or data across the cable itself. In fact, there is no spec on what the cable itself consists of - it could be a fiber optic cable for all the USB-C spec cares.
It's why you can use an expensive DP USB-C cable and not get thunderbolt support - because the chipsets in the cable itself have to support the thunderbolt spec.
It's why it's entirely plausible that Apple can specify that you can only use MiFi compatible cables if you want full charging or data transfer capabilities.
"Janky" is inserted by you. I can use high quality cables that aren't certified and perfectly capable of handling power, and such. With this comes the implication that any manufacturer who is not willing to give Apple a cut of their cable sales is something inferior and subpar.
> They only warrant that if you use the certified cable, your phone won't blow up.
I guarantee you that they warrant no such thing. And that they'll point you at the cable manufacturer if something damages your phone.
Paying for MFI might be a problem for your local Brooklyn usb-c cable artisan but not for your high volume low margin Asian cable manufacturer.
It was $10 (or 10% of the cost) prior to that.
Quoting the article:
> According to leaker ShrimpApplePro on Twitter, Apple will be requiring MFi certification for products connecting to the iPhone 15.
If there's such a huge pool of potential trouble brewing with a 20W phone, why do they even allow such maleficent third party malfeasance?
/s
... which is roughly what's being proposed here for iPhone. Since some Samsung devices charge at 45W and require 3A (hence e-marked) cables, one can infer Apple wants to do something similar for iPhone in the future.
Edit: I should add that it is possible for a fully complaint combination of devices to not charge at max(sink power, source power), because not all possible combinations of voltage and current may be supported. For example a 60W charger may support 20V@3A, but if the 60W sink only supports 12V charging, it needs 5A and this combination won't support 60W charging. In practice this should be rare though, it would be terrible product design.
Re: your edit. There is this exact kind of profile incompatibility between the Leviton T5636 and the HomePod mini when two devices are plugged in. The outlet should support 30W for each receptacle, which is more than enough to provide the 18W/20W the HomePod mini requires. But for some PD profile incompatibility reason (9V/3A probably), it does not get enough power.
And it is in fact terrible product design. Leviton is pointing the finger at Apple but in reality, who knows.
IMO it's harder for the source to be flexible with voltage, and especially current limit, so I'd put somewhat more blame on the sink here for not being flexible enough. Generally a sink should expect to be plugged into an 'unknown' source, so should at least make an effort to support multiple voltages.
Designing a multiport power source with a shared power limit is a bit of a tricky problem.
I can assure you that counterfeit Thunderbolt cables don't work at Thunderbolt speeds.
Also, power delivery is defined by USB standards, not Thunderbolt.
> I'm going to contend this isn't so much subverting EU rules but rather trying to ensure that Apple won't get blamed when someone uses a cable that can't handle the power when plugged in given that there's not a good standard out there for this and no enforcement of the "ok, there's something - try this..."
Two questions:
1. (Given Apple fanboy view of world, then) why can I charge an Apple laptop with a random USB-C cable?
2. Why would that logic not apply to iPhones too?
> (Given Apple fanboy view of world, then) why can I charge an Apple laptop with a random USB-C cable?
Not that I appreciate the tone here, but yes, you could charge an Apple laptop with what you would call "random" USB-C cable, as long as it delivers the necessary wattage. That is not the issue at hand, though.
> Why would that logic not apply to iPhones too?
It could.
But there are orders of magnitude more phones than laptops, and laptop users tend to use, well, their laptop chargers for the most part. Still, I have seen one or two laptop motherboards essentially melted, because they were overdrawing power.
By the way, I never argued that Apple should create a new standard, or a new certification program. What I originally said was that I wish that Apple would prevent cables that are not PD compliant from working with their devices, because USB-IF sucks at enforcing this.
Apple has no such enforcement capabilities for USB as they don't have any rights to that trademark.
Personally Im super glad there are a world of much cheaper more affordable cables that work quite adequately.
I do wish we could as a society defend ourselves better but certification is an expensive & absurd trust mechanism. If certification were a lower cost, faster process I'd respect it as a social safeguard, but certification isnt easy. For one, it's not one off... USB-IF has to go shopping from time to time in the wild to make sure the goods are still good. It's expensive, but for a reason.
Ultimately relying on centralized trust actors, and using aggressive legalist pursuit to enforce compliance, is 100% against the spirit Im looking for. It has some upsides, but that's obvious legalistic authoritarianism, is the lawful-evil square on the D&D alignment chart. It's what I think the EU is trying to get away from!
So let's talk alternatives!
Personally it frustrates angers & saddens me that our systems are blanketly unobservable. USB-HID spec has really good telemetry for chargers to self-report their output voltage & current (a monitoring task many already perform). Devices ought be able to detect input voltage fairly well (and again many implicitly do, they again just dont report).
Being able to see graphs of output/charger power versus input power seems like a dead simple ask, and the difference between those two is loss. Being able to make whats happening easy to see would let us all help self-police, would let us become smart informed consumers, who know how to gauge the quality of what we have & share that good information out.
It should just be a standard feature in computing that objects extrospect, report; computers rhat are black boxes lack the fundamental "soft"-ness that is computings best & highest angel.
Okay! I’m happy for my hardware vendor to assure me that my cable isn’t going to set my phone on fire or do any other harmful or nefarious things. If someone else is happy to take that gamble, I sure hope it’s regulated when I’m in transit or my own home but otherwise the world is their proverbial oyster. I wish their hardware vendor cared more about their wellbeing but given existing regulatory standards I just hope more vendors are as adept and scrupulous.
So, still feeling pretty good about my analysis so far.
Your vendor needs some social conscience & to sometimes not always use force to get their way.
A Google engineer sacrificed his Chromebook Pixel to test USB-C cables - https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/3/10905432/usb-c-cable-fries...
> Google engineer Benson Leung has been on a mission to prove that all USB-C cables are not created equal, and that mission appears to have ended — or at least climaxed — with one cable totally frying his computer. Leung has been testing USB-C cables and posting reviews of them on Amazon for a few months now, and the most recent cable he tested, made by SurjTech, turned out to be "completely miswired" — something he didn't realize until after it "managed to destroy my test equipment," he says, including a Chromebook Pixel.
And the older article A Google engineer is testing USB Type-C cables so you don't have to - https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/5/9674462/usb-type-c-google...
His reviews: https://www.amazon.com/gp/profile/amzn1.account.AFLICGQRF6BR...
And so? How many people know that USB-IF exists? How many people know how to tell if USB-IF has certified a cable? If you don't have the packaging, how do you know if the cable is certified?
The USB-IF is pretty inadequate here, even if we ignore the existence of fake certifications. They can't even work out how to mark the different USB-C cables so you know which ones are what kind, leading to all sorts of problems and confusion for users.
99% of the time, all I need from the cable is <60W of power capacity. I don't need data, and I wouldn't even notice if the cable was 1Gbps or 40Gbps.
I've literally never had a problem with _that_ use case.
Even when I need the cable for data transmission, all of the ones I have are either from my phone, laptop, dock, etc., etc. and follow standards, or are from no-name Amazon brands but _still_ seem to follow the spec completely fine.
Sure there are exceptions like the Nintendo Switch, but virtually all devices at that price point can handle bad cables.
3 were good enough for safe use with 20V@3A. 47 were sub standard. We had to unplug 9 during our testing, as they started to melt. One of them started to smoke after 60 seconds.
USB-IF certification means nothing, as everybody can just buy it, or fake it.
With EPR 240W incoming I am getting seriously afraid for friends & family.
That's just not true. The USB-IF won't certify a cable unless it can do 20V @ 3A, which is around 2x the voltage at 3A that the iPhone would even try to do.
If true, this is just money-grab and spiteful behavior out of Apple, nothing more.