I’m not even sure people understand that Apple also contributed heavily to the development of USB-C along with other companies, some of them European.
The irony is that I believe the Lightning Connector, the iPhone connector, has been the longest standing standard connector (11 years now) and the introduction of the Qi “wireless charging” is also a good argument against this narrow sighted EU authoritarian/communist mentality that some apparatchiks can make better decisions than those who actually do and create things.
Has someone actually asked Apple to lay out its reasons for not adopting the larger and bulkier USB-C? Could it be that it has something to do with trying to engage in economic warfare against Apple because it’s harder to compete?
TLDR: The EU wanted less e-waste. Apple refused to engage, so the EU forced them to engage or leave.
I’m not even a fan of Apple look e for different reasons, but the very same reason Apple is likely not even engaging the EU clowns and their attempt at making Apple products worse with Micro USB (what a horrible design and technology because of it), it’s also the very same reason that the EU cannot ban Apple, because Apple is to god and the market leader in design and creating good products that people actually want.
I can assure you that Apple’s lightning connector has caused there to be less waste than any other manufacturer.
Case in point too; I just bought a temporary Nokia phone. And here it is, 2023, and they’re still using that horrible MicroUSB design plug that you have to look at every single time to make sure you get the plug in correctly. OUSD also discriminatory against the blind who have to feel they plug itself to figure out which way is up, whereas I can plug the lightning connector into any of the Apple devices in pitch black darkness because they go in the same every time.
"We tried giving you an option, but you kept picking wrong, so we're taking your right to choose away."
We may tolerate the fiction of corporate personhood in some circumstances, but companies are not people, and their "rights" should be strictly limited - especially when they purposefully ignore the wishes of elected representatives for a decade.
There is no "unfair advantage" to USB-C patent holders, it's a standard that the industry settled on in a cooperative fashion in which Apple was itself a major player.
No one prevented the industry from working on a "patent-free" different standard.
Point is, you can't and shouldn't promote _different brands of connectors_ as it defeats the purpose of having less waste if in a household iPhone users are gonna use a different charger from the others.
The reason is extremely obvious: cementing user lock-in to the Apple ecosystem.
https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...
https://panic.com/blog/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...
USB-C is perfectly good for the moment in time we live in.
Imagine if goddamn power plugs in your wall were starting to be different because some company thinks a different format is better.
Or if they started to pull some "you can only charge your car with this very specific type of connector, but not others" and cars are much more impacted and sensitive by arguments like yours.
As for longevity, dunno; Micro-USB was around since 2007 and is still in use. And the European preference of Micro-USB does not seem to have prevented other standards. And of course, 3.5mm connector has been around for way way longer (until Apple decided to murder it in cold blood:). There's Ethernet of course. IEEE and various C-series cables?
Communist states centrally plan the economy. Everything is specified by government committees down to tiny details like the production levels of individual factories, what they produce, how, and what does or does not get researched.
The EU has developed a penchant for micromanaging the details of private industry to an extraordinary degree. The similarities to communist central planning are clear to see:
1. There is no democracy. The Commission does what it wants. The EU proclaims itself to have a parliament, but the body that uses that name isn't the same as a normal parliament.
2. They love to specify the details of trivial things like exactly how fast kettles operate, the exact way the curvature of bananas are classified, how browsers display cookie UI, and now the way phones plug into chargers.
3. All the above is justified via the usual terms ideologically left wing people like to use such as "fairness", "cooperation" etc.
None of this is a surprise because the EU traces its roots to a document written by communists called the Ventotene Manifesto, and prior Commission presidents have even celebrated Marx.
https://www.euronews.com/2018/05/04/juncker-opens-exhibition...
None of what you listed I see as a defining feature of Communism. It feels like some people have heard that "Communism is a bad thing that Russians did", and then they apply it to anything and everything they disagree with or may have centrally-planned authoritarian approaches.
"Centrally planned undemocratic / authoritarian" has so many wonderful implementations and versions, and communism is barely one of them :)
I remain unconvinced to see "USB-C Standard" as a "left-wing communist conspiracy" :-/
The USB-C standard is fine. Nobody is attacking USB-C in this thread. The left wing quasi-communist stuff comes from the absurd assumption that it is the last word in cable design and therefore it should be illegal to use anything else. That is the sort of planning error that led communist states to poverty.
You do need to pay them a (very reasonable) yearly fee if you wish to use the USB logo on your product though, and this includes agreeing to subject your product to compliance testing. As far as standards bodies go, USB is just about the furthest from "authoritarian" you can get.
Not sure how that's irony, since the connector is proprietary and not an open standard, resulting in e-waste and expensive chargers.
Your argument would have more weight if they opened it up. Do you think Apple should have done that?
I can charge basically all (dozens) of my gadgets using usb-c cable, but I still need to carry additional outdated lightning with me to charge the damn phone.
Rent to high? No problem, make increasing rent illegal. Got a homeless problem? Make it illegal to be homeless. Don't like changing your power cord? No problem: illegal. All these ideas would be like playing chess with the ability to only think one move ahead. It would be like having a 12 year old king pronounce today is ice cream day [all while facing certain thermonuclear war].
Isn't there a chicken and egg problem there - no one will release products with new power interfaces, because they aren't releasable in Europe.
I suppose such products might get released first in the US, but which large tech company if going to ignore the EU market when releasing important products?
Yes, that's the point. Instead of anyone releasing products with new power interfaces the goal is to have industry-wide discussion on adopting new standards for everyone.
I think it's reasonable and only a positive thing. If the industry will decide that USB-C isn't enough they will revise the standard.
That’s not part of the regulation whatsoever
> If the industry will decide that USB-C isn't enough they will revise the standard.
But the industry doesn’t come together and pick a standard. The EU did. The closest industries came to picking a standard were freely choosing from many different formats that emerged.
Imagine what it would take for the executives at Apple, Samsung, Motorola, etc. to come together and all agree on some new format that perhaps one of them developed. Now consider that the EU would still have to approve it. The conclusion made from that Herculean effort might just be null and void. Also consider that this sounds a lot like is collusion. These companies would never get as far as sitting down with each other and are even less likely with this EU regulation.
What’s worse is this all completely subjugates new players, who may be more likely to innovate and which can’t abuse any existing user base, to the current phone market. They would never have a seat at the table.
The EU does not really care on the standard and does not judge the technical decision - it cares about that there is one standard.
So if Samsung, Apple and co come together for the next improved standard, then this is exactly the purpose of this legislation and no one has to fear if the EU is in a good mood afterwards.
It is specifically Apple that has been the plays-badly-with-others child in this domain; the industry as a whole doesn't seem to have had much of a problem with the general idea.
No, the EU told the industry to come to a consensus, and everyone except Apple agreed on USB-C.
You mean exactly what happened when the USB standard was created by 7 tech companies?
Standardization works to turn already existing solution into a widespread commodity. Standardization does not work efficiently to invent new better ways of doing things.
The only viable driver for innovation is experimentation, not making new ‘better’ standards on paper inside some walled “industry” committee.
Yes - seems plainly obvious to me.
What’s more, the more countries to implement this makes it more unlikely to see different chargers. Maybe a better charger is released in the US. Now what if the US bans it? Are they going to innovate for the Brazilian market? The regulation scales very poorly.
What EU wants to avoid is Apple giving "unfair" advantages to their own chargers (which could either come from Apple making better chargers or artificially slowing third party ones).