The joint motion points to adopting Directive 2014/53/EU which requires common _chargers_ but says nothing about the port that the phone uses. As far as I can tell this is only for the back half of the charger / brick that connects to the wall.
Yet the Apple statement, and most of the articles about this (including the linked one), are talking about the phone's connector and talks about lightning and usb-c. Most of the comments online are talking about how this forces Apple to use usb-c.
So, which is it? Isn't this just regulating the power bricks / back half of the charging equation? I don't see anything in the joint motion or directive stating a connector on a device has to be uniform at all.
Indeed, the text only speaks of a "common charger" without specifying further, so I'm somewhat surprised you make the claim the directive speaks only about one sub-part of the charger.
To me things appear thus: the EP passed a directive that states mobile radio equipment should have a "common charger", sensibly letting manufacturers decide how to solve the interoperability problem. Apple then argued "well, it's not explicit that you should be able use the 'common charger' without an adapter" and continued making phones that can't be charged by equipment made by others.
This join resolution isn't super clear about it, but does indicate that: "common charger" really ought to mean you can use the same charger for all similar devices.
Apple's charger already had a standard USB-A port and has moved to having a standard USB-C port.
It's the cable that they include with the iPhone that has a USB connector on the charger end and a lightning port on the phone end.
That included cable allows you to charge with any manufacturer's USB-C charger in the same way that the previous version of the cable worked with any USB-A charging port.
So, in summary, the cable Apple gives you works with other manufacturers chargers, and the charger Apple gives you works with other phones, using a standard USB-C cable that, I would imagine, came with the phone.
If they want to force Apple's hand specifically, they should be focusing on the port on the phone, not the charger.
> So, in summary, the cable Apple gives you works with other manufacturers chargers, and the charger Apple gives you works with other phones, using a standard USB-C cable that, I would imagine, came with the phone.
The point is you still need extra stuff just to charge your phone when you switch manufacturer. So what apple provides is in fact not a "common charger", but merely a transformer+rectifier that, using additional equipment, can be made into a "common charger".
Whereas the entire point of the regulation is to not need the cord that came with your phone, but to use anyone's. They got tired of all the proprietary connectors back in the feature phone days.
So what specific kind of USB-C cable will be allowed to be packed with my next shiny for the decades to come? What kind of USB-PD will the phone be allowed to support and - if the phone supports a higher voltage/amperage combination than the EU fixed in 2020 - will I have to buy an additional cable to support this?
How did we ever switch from SCART to HDMI after the EU forced the TV manufacturers to only support SCART in 1996?
Oh, it didn’t.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Apple’s powerplugs for iPhone/iPad only ever came with USB-A - or now with USB-C. They thankfully switched their lightning port before USB-C was even published, when everybody was still selling broken micro-USB or barrel connectors. There are many problems to solve, but Lightning isn’t one.
One day they might be, but they probably think switching now is too soon. Like the person above said, lightning came out before UBS-C. Apple switched from their long https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dock_connector#Apple_30-pin_... only 8 years ago. Everyone had to throw away their docks and charging cables. Now just 8 years later you want them to make everyone throw all those away again? Wikipedia says the 30 pin connector lasted from 2003 to 2014, so let people use the things they paid for a couple more years. Maybe Apple will come up with something better than USB-C in that time.
Lightning being a better connector than USB-C doesn't help.
Because not everything should be USBC, and not everything needs to be USBC.
USB C won’t be the standard forever, and it’s a standard that takes many forms and has caused lots of confusion, so it’s not exactly the gold standard.
USB C isn’t forever, eventually USB D will come around, and what’ll happen? The EU and their (often targeted anti-American-tech) laws will hold phones back, or leave themselves out of the market.
EU isn't legislating USB-C, it's demanding that the industry standards body have a common standard for charging, and continue to develop it as a common standard. The manufacturers are going to be collaborating on the specs. It will be like TCP/IP, DNS, UTF and many other things.
But why does the EU bureaucracy know that charging ports cannot be an important part of product differentiation? I would hope they wouldn’t legislate a common screen size or a common operating system... why legislate a common charging port? I STRONGLY prefer Lightning and would hope that people who prefer Lightning like me can buy Apple and people who prefer USB-C can buy Android.
Because the EU isn't there to pamper big corporations, it is there to strengthen the rights of consumers and citizens by strengthening competition. If your company can't survive without selling adapters or locking in customers with unnecessary differing standards (and therefor avoiding competition), maybe it isn't really healthy to begin with.
I would have a different perspective if there was really a practical reason for apple to go the different route — but there isn't.
How is there no practical reason? The practical reason is implied by context. Apple is among the single most profitable companies in existence, consumers vote with their wallets and their wallets overwhelmingly vote in a manner that supports Apple's decisions. It's a very European thing to point at the purpose of a government entity and assume it's true. Helping consumers? If consumers prefer universal cable standards then they'll favor products with cross compatability standards. The only people who benefit from this government intervention are the EU businesses that can't be bothered to examine themselves long enough to find a way to compete effectively. This sort of disconnected legislation is just another reason the EU has lost significance as an innovator, they'd rather settle for a comfortable and unchallenging norm.
Isn't it possible that consumers don't like needing separate proprietary chargers for iPhones, but it's a small enough part of the overall iOS experience it doesn't noticeably harm sales? After all, phone ecosystems are a duopoly. It's not an area where free market arguments hold water. This legislation lets the industry decide on their own standard. Do you think customers would also enjoy incompatible Wi-Fi standards, or cell modems?
Sure it’s possible but the opposite is also possible and politicians shouldn’t be trying to figure this out. There clearly isn’t some major harm to the world being caused by two different power standards. I can say that I personally vastly prefer Lightning to USB-C. Politicians should focus on the areas where the harm has been clearly established, like in privacy, not some dubious guesses about what power cable people like. And in other places where Apple has their own standard, like AirPlay and AirDrop, I prefer it to the open standard, so I’d prefer if politicians didn’t make laws standardizing the worse option.
To me it's the same as fridges and TVs. I should be able to buy a common cable that plugs into a Samsung or an LG TV and the same for an Apple or Google phone.
The rule was in place ten years ago. That's why every other manufacturer ships USB now, and even Apple puts USB on one side of their charger cord in malicious compliance.
I’ve been using lightning happily since my non-Apple devices were coming with broken micro USB cables. As a consumer I’ve been very happy with this. There’s nothing malicious about it.
AFAIK that is the directive that that was already planned years ago.
I remember many years ago there was a new charger for each version(!) of a phone, so the EU said either the companies choose a common port voluntary or they will regulate them.
That was 2009 shortly after that every major phone provider switched to micro usb, except of course apple.
2014 the first regulation was voted and should have went in effect 2017.
They gave apple the benefit of the doubt with the 30 pin connector and lightning that apple was going to make them standards, apple hasn't made that happen, so now the EU is saying they have to use an actual standard.
Anecdotally, my friends' cables always seem to be frayed. I personally have not owned an apple phone in many years, but I recently bought an apple brand usb-c to 3.5mm adapter at an airport because that's all they had and I forgot mine at home... It stopped working after about a month of very gentle use. It's in perfect physical condition.
The point is, if you have to keep replacing them, it's not a reduction in e-waste and runs counter to the spirit of the ruling.
I have the dongle that came with my phone, and I ordered a second of the same kind from the website. No issues with either of them. I've personally never broken a charging cable of any sort, except for micro USB where the little prongs stop latching properly. I may just be unusually careful with mine.
> If they want to force Apple's hand specifically, they should be focusing on the port on the phone, not the charger.
It's worth remembering that the backers of the EU legislation started with the idea of reducing e-waste, not punishing a particular manufacturer. Nor is it a Lightning vs USB-C squabble.
Getting people to throw their lightning cables, charging ports, docking stations, etc away would be counter-productive to their aims. The Lightning port has been around for a long time and getting rid of that will cause significant e-waste.
The Lightning port has been around for a long time and getting rid of that will cause significant e-waste.
From personal experience, Lightning already produces significant e-waste. The lack of strain relief means that my family experiences many broken Lightning cables each year.
Right, but by using their own proprietary cable, Apple cables (and those officially “approved” by Apple) are the ones that get sold, and the terrible failure rates.
In my attempt at reading both of these there seems to be a clear distinction being made when it refers to cables and when it refers to chargers. It also never really mentions ports.
Therefore, to me, it cares less about the port and cable on the phone half and more about the brick / part that plugs into the wall.
Neither document provides a definition for "charger". So perhaps whoever is in charge of implementing this directive (I'm not sure how this works in EU law) can interpret it either way?
I read "charger" to mean "the thing you use for charging", and not really bothering with the technical detail of exactly how this thing is made.
I think reading the texts as if they spoke only of the transformer/brick itself is to narrow, and not in line with the common understanding of what a "charger" is.
I will offer this suggestion of a precise definition for "charger": the complete technological assemblage required for transferring electrical power, suitable for storage, from a common wall socket onto the portable radio device.
Basically, if you have a wall socket, a mobile radio device, and a third thing, and they cannot be assembled so that the mobile can be charger, the thing is not a "common charger".
Good points. My only hesitation on the charger definition is most laws include whatever definition the legislature is operating under and sometimes it's different than what you'd expect.
You can define the charger to include the cable, and I can define the phone to include the cable. Either way it doesn’t provide much insight into the definitions with legal force.
That's not how it works. What the lawmakers mean is pretty clear as soon as you go read the documents affixed to the motion. There is no need for more boilerplate.
The 2018 Comission report has this to say on the subject for example :
The study has, in particular, provided the following information and conclusions: even manufacturers of mobile phones which did not sign up to the Memorandum of Understanding appear to have also adopted Micro-USB charging solutions, leading to the indication that almost 100% of data enabled phones sold in Europe in 2013 were compliant with Micro-USB charging solution.; due to the Memorandum of Understanding, it is estimated to have resulted in six to 21 million fewer standalone chargers over the period 2011 to 2013; the increasing prevalence of Micro-USB charging has limited the need to purchase standalone chargers and consequently reduced the use of raw materials than might otherwise have been the case.
Since the previous experience of the Memorandum of Understanding had proven to be successful for the reasons mentioned above, the Commission wished to continue the approach already followed based on a voluntary agreement. Moreover, a voluntary solution could more readily accommodate new technology and innovation compared to a regulatory option. Additionally, a voluntary approach may have had the advantage of having a wider scope, compared to the regulatory option, for example, it may have covered both ends of the charging cable 79 .
However, given the unsatisfactory outcome so far of the progress in the voluntary option, the Commission will shortly launch a study to assess costs and benefits of different options, including the regulatory one.
If the report is saying almost 100% of phones sold follow the reg, then they must be saying Apple are in compliance, right? I don’t see how you can get near 100% of phones without including the iPhone.
Also, take a look here:
> Additionally, a voluntary approach may have had the advantage of having a wider scope, compared to the regulatory option, for example, it may have covered both ends of the charging cable.
>However, given the unsatisfactory outcome so far of the progress in the voluntary option, the Commission will shortly launch a study to assess costs and benefits of different options, including the regulatory one.
This seems to say fairly clearly that only a voluntary option would cover both ends of the cable. Then it says they are looking at the regulatory option instead of the voluntary option. It doesn’t seem to contemplate a non-voluntary regulation covering both ends of the cable.
I don’t think I’m being pedantic or obtuse here, just reading the doc plainly.
Exceept ... in the case of wireless charging, yup. Which they explicitly mention. Would that mean that ... maybe ... the other kind of charging, involves cables?
Finally they state that one of the goals is reduction in the volume of cables collected and recycled.
The charger is obviously the thing between your phone and the power socket. It seems perfectly clear to me.
Because the entire thing is a charger. You can't use the charger without the cable. If the cable was a separate thing, fully interchangeable, the whole law wouldn't be necessary.
And they can't in hindsight decide that the cables aren't part of the "package" because they wrote in the resolution what the motivation of this law is, which is interoperability / compatibility / interchangeability and reducing waste, and if the cable part is non standard and not compatible, then obviously you'd need an additional cable to make the whole charger simply operable. Needing additional cables is what the resolution states (several times) is one of the explicit purposes, to prevent.
They also specifically discuss that wireless charging should be common as well, because not needing a cable is even better than needing the same cable.
I get the idea that sometimes EU laws are so clear and straightforward, that Americans implicitly don't trust them and expect a "gotcha!".
The thing that plugs into the wall is already regulated (for every electronic device, not just chargers). That is why you don't have to rewire your house when you buy a new phone. This directive is specifically for the bit that connects to your phone.
And every single Apple phone I've owned so far uses a cable that plugs into USB A. Which is a standard. I'm still using the wall warts I got for my original iPhone. Which have international wall plug kits. Solid, long-lived electronics.
Meanwhile, the burner phones I've bought for when I'm in the EU have these shitty all-in-one wall-to-micro-USB, and I ended up eventually throwing them out. So there's your e-waste.
The problem with the burner chargers was that they were inflexible. The wall plug couldn't be changed for other countries, and there was no USB A between the wall wart and the cable so I couldn't use it to charge all of my other gadgets.
It is? Only in some abstract sense. They all already have a cable that plugs into USB A. I'm supposed to throw them all away to move to a new standard interface in a different place?
What is Apple is heading toward completely sealed phones with only wireless charging / data xfer and they’re nervous that the EU is going to force them to keep the physical port on the device?
Well, not that it's relevant to the topic at hand, but if they do so, I'm leaving the ecosystem.
Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me. I go weeks without plugging my phone into the wall, but when I need it, I really need it.
> Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me.
In this hypothetical future you'd have to replace the power bank and charging cables that you currently own, but you'll be able to achieve both of those goals just fine. You can already buy power banks[1] with built-in charging coils, and I imagine some enterprising company will be along with a svelte USB-to-Qi-coil cable that suctions onto your phone any day now.
I carry a 10000 mAh battery pack[1] in my jacket[2], which besides powering the heater elements inside the jacket also provides wireless charging to my phone.
I don't know about effectiveness, but 20-30 minutes of wireless charging gives 60% + of battery power on my phone, and while i don't regularly charge my phone fully in the jacket, only top it off, i charge the battery pack once every week or so, and it is very rarely at 0%
Apple has worked on wireless proximity charging where the device merely needs to be within a few feet of the charger. I hear there are serious engineering challenges that make this hard to achieve but I don’t think they will remove the port with the current QI charging experience. Maybe there will be a charging battery you can just throw in the same bag as the phone and the phone will charge.
I'd say there are serious physical challenges with this problem. Wireless power transfer over distances of more than an inch without big parabolic antennas is about as realistic as hoverboards.
uBeam is the canonical example of this. Their own VP Engineering left and publicly stated that the technology simply doesn't work. ELI5 is that you need an impractically large phased array to transmit, and the attenuation is precipitous even at short distances. The commentary I've read (by no means exhaustive) treats it as if it's a "laws of physics" problem, but I would assume the company had some reasonably compelling answers to this challenge given that they raised $40m USD from some bright investors.
Please tell me you read my "Sealed" iPhone comment on macrumors :D
Yes. And I think they will use Smart Connector currently used on iPad as Data and Power Connection. Since it isn't really a port so the devices is still all sealed up. Assuming they get rid up Sim tray as well.
I wonder what that will do for security. It seems the publicly known exploits tend to use the wired connection to swipe data from the phone. It would likely be much more difficult to do that wirelessly. It would be a shame to lose the potential hardening benefits because of some lawmakers who may not have privacy as a core interest... or indeed quite the opposite.
USB-PD doesn't use the data wires (dp/dn or the two high speed diffpairs), it uses a sidechannel (CC). You can have a full PD implementation without a host controller or any data connection.
Who could possibly criticize the EU for mandating something which has a history of being successfully used by some of the producers to fuck over the rest?
Also this motion is not deciding anything. The parliament is just asking the commission (the EU equivalent to a ministry/government) to publish a study on this and take a next step.
Fixing to a specific standard would also not be something done in EU law - laws are meant to be slow-changing, this would be a barrier. You might have a law that specifies that a standard should be set and/or industry bodies ought to agree on a standard to use.
What I thought they were going for was that phones would no longer come with cable+charger, instead you could buy the one type of charger + cable that exists.
This would mean one connector for all devices.
If they allow different connectors on phones then lots of different cables will be made, and when a person switches phones then their old cable ends up in the trash.
Let’s say this rule was in place 10 years ago and we standardised on micro USB. How would it have been possible to advance to the next generation of technology like USB-C.
This feels that it’s banking on USB-C being forever future proofed or wireless connections does everything we ever need.
The standard can be changed, it's just that manufacturers have to agree between themselves on the new standard. No involvement from the government is required.
They can make USB 4, 5,6, connector C, D,E,Z, whatever. That's fine. What's not cool, is creating proprietary connector and not letting anyone else use it.
Mind you they only have to agree on charging, not data transfer.
As to whether it's worth it: hard to tell, there comes a time in a technology's maturity where compliance with a common standard is more important than incremental innovation. The power sockets in your house are dtandard, and your power company and electrician are not allowed to innovate, because at some point we decided compatability was more important.
>The standard can be changed, it's just that manufacturers have to agree between themselves on the new standard.
If an agreement of all manufacturers is needed before introducing a new standard in production, it means that it will be delayed by the lowest common denominator of manufacturers until many years later. Which isn't good for the consumer, because they could've gotten a new superior charging standard on their phones many years earlier, as opposed to waiting multiple years until all manufacturers adopt it.
The agreement doesn't need to be unanimous. And it's fine for the agreement to be "just use whatever the latest small form factor USB collector is" which has been the de facto Android standard since the beginning.
It sounds like you're arguing that the lowest common denominator phone manufacturer will be holding up progress. But the connector is the easiest part, especially if it's a truly ubiquitous standard, because it will be heavily commoditized. The lowest common denominator phone manufacturer will just buy whatever the cheapest connector from China is, and this will almost always be whatever connector is most common.
My argument is that charging is at this point a mature technology, we have a charging standard up to 100w. Do you expect future phones to draw more? What possible improvements could future charging standard have, as far as a mobile phone goes?
And yes, it is pretty normal to have manufacturers sit round a table and agree standards -most ports on a computer, 4g wireless, etc.
You cant even come up with your own phone communication standard - countries allocate frequency specifically for 4g or 5g, none will give you a frequency band for a proprietary communication standard.
Apple can still implement proprietary technology in an USB-C charging cable that allows their phones to be charged much faster than others, as long as their device can still be charged by a generic cable and vice versa (without the added benefits).
Wow so now every time that Apple gets ready to introduce a new connector they have to wait for the entire industry to agree to it?
But guess what? Only the end connecting to the wall is standard, the end connecting to devices in the house are far from standard. How is this different than iPhones?
Usb type c is a connector type. Not a protocol, you are able to run different protocol through the same physical line as long as both side understands it. PD, HDMI, miniDP, PCIE, earphone, and probably other device run through the exact same line with different protocol. And vendor is also allowed to add their own one. Apple also don't need to accept all protocols above except charging. What is the point to introduce new connector type every single time you want to add new compatibility? To earn more money from selling gadget?
I am not sure I understand your argument "my toaster does not have a standard connector, so neither should my iphone"? I mean, maybe they should, or maybe none cares to regulate toasters. Or maybe its only relevant to portable electronics, so laptops should have them but toasters shouldn't.
Think a bit broader - if apple wants to introduce a new phone communication standard, like 5g but different? It can't - frequencies are allocated for a specific purpose, and none will give you any for a proprietary protocol only you control.
This is not such a revolutionary idea if you look at a broader picture
If Apple introduced a phone that didn’t comply with the 5G standard it wouldn’t be able to interoperate and would be less useful.
But the government didn’t mandate that iMessage had to be compatible with SMS (even though it is somewhat) nor did they mandate that AirDrop had to interoperate with a standard.
Should the government also mandate a standard messaging protocol must be used or that it has to work with SMS?
The right to use radio frequencies are auctioned by the government. If Apple bought the rights to use the frequencies it could do whatever it wanted with them.
For instance, Sprint had WiMAX for 4G before they had LTE, two carriers have GSM and two have CDMA. The government didn’t mandate the protocols nor did they force the carriers to use the same protocol or the phone makers to support both.
Government absolutely do care what you do with the frequencies. The UK government auctioned 5G frequencies for a specific purpose. It took great pains to clear these frequencies, they weren't just lying around unused.
All the protocols you listed are open for adoption by various manufacturers. Apple absolutely would not be allowed to use them for a private protocol they keep to themselves. Airwaves are a public good, not private property.
They even come with coverage obligations.
Not only that, even before Sprint acquired Nextel, Nextel was using the spectrum it had for its own proprietary wireless protocols and it wasn’t Big Government that killed either initiative - it was people exercising their own free will not buying Nextel phones and later WiMAX phones.
Most would link Sprint’s WiMAX decision back to its acquisition of Nextel Communications, which wrapped in 2005, and brought with it a significant load of 2.5 GHz spectrum licenses with specific build out dates. Nextel prior to being acquired had been testing various IP-based mobile broadband technologies, including various proprietary ones like Flash-OFDM and TDD-UMTS, as well as WiMAX and HSDPA.
No I'm genuinely asking whether and where SMS is still that popular in the Europe (your link talks about US and "worldwide"). I know many/most people in the US use SMS text for messaging.
But as far as I'm aware in Europe everybody is on WhatsApp, Telegram or something similar that uses data. But maybe I'm wrong and there's still some holdout EU country still texting, that is why I asked. But they generally all have pretty good data plans.
And because it was only voluntary, Apple was able to innovate and create the lightning port which worked in either orientation and inspired the adoption of USB-C by the rest of the world
USB-C is a complete mess. The physical appearance of the connector is nice, but the design by committee that resulted in invisible but critical differences is horrible. You cannot tell by looking at a cable or devices you are trying to connect or charge of the cable will provide the needed bandwidth or voltage. Two cables might look identical but one won't work at all for what you need and you have no way to tell.
As an example, I have had to purchase a very specific usb-c data cable for my 4K monitor so I can connect my MacBook with one cable. The standard cables which can charge are not able to carry data at the correct rate.
At the office, this was solved by giving me two cables - one for charge and one for data which connect to the DisplayPort.
The only thing as painful is the box of unlabelled hdmi cables I have that all works to varying degrees.
There is an easy solution to this, either require all cables be the same specs or require that cables have their specs labeled. It's already an improvement over the past where every device had a different cable, I can at least slow charge instead of no charge.
I don't know, I find out much worse that I might go to a store to buy a cable and then find out that it only charges very slowly and might not do data at all. I'd rather spend $15 bucks on a cable (or just carry the one that the devise came with anyway) and know it does what it's supposed to. Even after this legislation, I still need more cables anyways, since this only covers cellphones. My Kindle still uses micro-usb. Who carries around multiple phones by different vendors anyways which is the only issues this would solve. I'm generally neutral on regulation, but this is just completely pointless regulation that solves no real problem.
Presumably companies are a lot faster after one competitor is actually shipping a connector with dual orientation. What's the hurry if everyone has to wait for consensus?
I think it's a reasonable possibility that we would all still be waiting for dual orientation if this mandate had been in place back then.
Why? The resolution states that the commission should make sure the standard can be updated as technology develops:
"[...] the Commission, without hampering innovation, should ensure that the legislative framework for a common charger will be scrutinised regularly in order to take into account technical progress; reiterates the importance of research and innovation in this domain to improve existing technologies and come up with new ones;"
This removes the incentives to innovate though. If you are found to have created the latest innovation surely there’s only two outcomes: either you can’t go to market or you are compelled to allow competitors to piggy back off of your technology en masse
When a technology matures, at some point standartisation becomes more important than innovation.
Power distribution, wall sockets and fire safety, fire hydrant connections were all unregulated and subject to innovation at some point. A fire engine from a different city could not connect to your water supply. At some point we decided that it wont do. We are gradually arriving to that point in software.
Are we at that point yet? The other thing about power distribution, wall sockets and fire safety is that they hardly ever change. If this had been in place 10 years ago, we could be stuck with micro USB.
If consumers would agree, people would stop buying Apple products because of this. Apple would be forced by the market to adopt the same connector. Clearly none of that is happening because nobody cares. If it's a big issue for someone they can just not buy an iPhone. That option already exists.
It's not an analogy, it's a general principle: we put a standard in place in important industries with mature technology. Your car has a standard interface to a petrol pump. Fire engine has a standard interface to a fire hydrant.
Some people believe it's time for a standard interface between a phone and a charger.
Those are all examples the market would solve really well. If some car manufacturer were to release a car that cannot be filled up at a regular petrol pump, nobody would buy the car. Those isn't happening with phones because clearly not enough people care.
We don’t have to reach for other industries. Electricity in the home is definitely “mature” yet we never saw the need for the government to mandate a standard for a plug on the device end.
The "other end" almost always has IEC connectors in Europe. Is this not the case in your country?
If there's no regulation enforcing this, it's because the EU doesn't think it's necessary — the industry has agreed upon a standard without intervention.
> If there's no regulation enforcing this, it's because the EU doesn't think it's necessary — the industry has agreed upon a standard without intervention.
Which is exactly what the EU asked them to do with chargers, 15 years ago :) And then they didn't so here's the resolution.
They can innovate to their heart's content, so long as the connector is compatible, and the legacy charging protocol still works. So e.g. if USB-C is the standard, Apple could still use Thunderbolt 3.
You mean you miss the good old innovative days when every phone model had its own charger?
The days where you needed special proprietary software to access any part of your phone if you connected it with to a computer using its special cable?
I remember losing plenty of sms history and contacts when changing phones because the dedicated phone software was too old to run on my windows, and the dodgy program I found on the internet wouldn't work with my specific model.
I also remember how in these heady days of unbridled innovation my girlfriend saved her sms's by writing them down on paper. And this was a fairly sensible solution to the innovation rich state of the market, where every manufacturer and close to every individual model, was its own silo.
No, most manufacturers switched to a standard so they wouldn't have a separate SKU for the EU market. Apple is fighting this because the rent seek hard on patents for their proprietary connectors.
Apple could define an USB-D standard tomorrow and use it for their phone charging cables, as longs as they allow other companies to use the same standard.
Which will be captured by a bunch of manufacturers who like to innovate on "cheapest / crappiest" and who will outvotes the one manufacturer who actually innovates on "best"...
As a customer, I'd like to keep the option for "best."
Why would you use SCSI to charge a phone? It'd be a standardized power connector, probably like those small round ones that are used for all sorts of household appliances.
Similarly, your projector is already using a standardized power cable: The one that goes into your wall socket.
For cables that don't terminate with a regular 2/3 prong on the other end, there are a few standardized shapes there too. My monitors and PC PSUs all take the same sort of connector on the non-wall-socket end even if they pull different amperages.
"5. Points out that the Commission, without hampering innovation, should ensure that the legislative framework for a common charger will be scrutinised regularly in order to take into account technical progress; reiterates the importance of research and innovation in this domain to improve existing technologies and come up with new ones;"
The law doesn't define the protocol. Apple could introduce USB-D as superior standard provided it is not proprietary. If this is a superior standard, other companies will adapt it too, becoming the new standard charger.
Presumably it is on the Commission to decide that USB-C is to be the next standard, and only then will there be a proposal for a law. (We are not yet talking about a law.)
Their current phones already follow a charging standard: qi. The $5 qi charger at Ikea charges an iPhone just fine. I have one on my desk.
Now, you are probably thinking that if something goes wrong, you'd rather be able to fix it than to throw your phone in the trash, generating more unnecessary waste. So Apple should take the lead and put a diagnostic port on each phone. Perhaps at the bottom, in the middle. To reduce the negative environmental impact of designing a new diagnostic port connection cable, Apple should design their diagnostic interface to be compatible with the billions of Lightning and/or USB-C cables already in the hands of consumers and repair shops.
Apple has kept working on improving the charging experience for its phones over time. The original iPhone cable, then lightning, then wireless charging. This stifles innovation.
Also: doesn't the government have more pressing concerns to worry about?
I doubt Apple's lobbying against this for some nefarious reason, like locking users into their proprietary technology.
I think Apple genuinely believe that they can provide a better product, and I believe they can too. I just don't care.
The inability to borrow cables or swap them between devices in the past was a not insignificant hassle. Keeping boxes of cables, not being able to borrow a friend's charger when visiting, not being able to replace cables except by ordering a new one from the manufacturer half a world away. Constant minor irritation.
The EU's first round of cable standardisation remains one of my favourite quality-of-life laws. No slightly more reliable cable is worth more than me than knowing I can use the same cable on as many devices as possible, and that I'm never going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere unable to buy a replacement charger for my phone.
It's also a point which the invisible hand has a great deal of trouble solving, because phones are such a vital part of life that you're unlikely to refuse to buy simply on the basis of its charger. It's an easy bit of revenue for manufacturers to jump on, because they know it's probably not quite annoying enough to significantly affect device choice. I love me a free market solution, but it's important to recognise where the market fails, and we've already seen it fail to solve this problem once.
More worrying to me, the charging port on this iPhone is wearing out. Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone.
Lightning is a crap proprietary design from my point of view. If it was USB-C I could just change the cable.
You didn't understand this sentence: "Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone." With Lightning, the springs are in the phone. With USB-C, the springs are in the cable. Springs are a moving part, and thus especially vulnerable to wear. Replacing a cable is cheaper than replacing a phone.
I did. The springs wearing out very much means bad contact at the contact points, we do agree there. However the receiver end with gold plated contacts points do also wear out. I’ve yet to see anything pointing towards springs wearing out before the gold plated areas (that is being worn by friction each insertion/removal) do.
I’ve got a Lightning cable with worn out gold plated contact points, the springs in the phone are perfectly fine.
My point being that without some reliable statistics pointing to springs being way more susceptible to wear than gold plated contact points, it doesn’t make any difference.
(FWIW: I currently work with factory equipment for PCB production testing and bad contact due to oxidation and wear is a much bigger issue than springs going bad, but that’s just my experience.)
It's quite well documented that manufacturers have to pay Apple to use lightning connectors, under the MFi scheme. While Apple doesn't issue a price sheet publicly it's been widely reported [1] as $4 per lightning connector - and that in the past it's been as much as $10 per device.
$4 per cable in licensing fees for every single cable sold sounds pretty nice to me. I can understand Apple wanting to keep that.
That seems high considering that Anker (chosen as a cheap but good company presumably not dodging Apple's licensing scheme) is selling lightning cables on Amazon for 8 bucks [1]
Amazon Basics has them for 6.50 [2]
I don't think they are sending 50% and 75% of their gross to Apple.
Why not? The cables are probably purchased from a few bulk vendors and sold after the license fees are paid. That's still 10+% margin on a low risk product.
Apple charges 30% for the app store, and that's very little overhead for then.
Do you actually know this or are you making an assumption? The App store seems to me like it would have some significant overheads both in cost and executional complexity.
This[1] article posits that Apple made $4.2bn p.a. from app store revenue share in the period 2008 - 2018.
Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):
1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.
2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.
3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).
4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.
5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.
6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)
In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.
Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.
I think what you might mean to say is that the app store is still a wildly profitable endeavour for Apple. I actually don't know if that's true or not. I know that Apple doesn't usually do things for free or at break even, but equally they run a combined P&L because breaking out the profitability of every single revenue line is very difficult.
In this instance, you could say: iPhone is a very profitable product, and app store is part of that. But dismissing the overheads or complexity of delivering a consumer app store on this scale seems clumsy, at best.
They used to be $3 - $4 dollar per cable, but price has gone down since then. ( That is why Lightning cable are cheaper than they were used to ) But that money is actually the connector itself and the controlling chip. So it isn't really $3- $4 of pure profits.
Having to pay Apple does not mean that Apple wishes to use proprietary cables in its devices in order to make money from third parties. Apple has several products/services which one could reasonably assume operate at break even or negative margin (e.g. Apple Developer accounts).
To illustrate (accept you may be too busy to do the research, but I'm trying to show you why a company which does $250bn a year in revenue doesn't give a shit about the max $4 & probably more like 2% licensing fee it takes per cable sold):
1. Why do you believe that this is a profitable endeavour for Apple?
2. Can you think of other reasons they might do this, beyond "making money"?
3. Can you point to the line in Apple's quarterly reporting which includes these cables? Did it spike in the quarters following the introduction of Lightning?
1. I dont think you understand Apple's business and supply chain really well, due to theirs sheer scale, they do count pennies.
2. There are roughly 1.5 billion devices with Lighting Port, if only 10% of its user buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150M per year. Not to mention they ship 250M lightning cables inside new devices every year that could be used to mask their BOM and margin. From Apple's perspective, that is a 400M profits per year business.
Counting pennies means saving money. It does not mean driving revenue through low-cost licensing sales.
I think your point is that Apple has such significant scale that just charging a few bucks a year to a fraction of their users means that they make what you or I would consider to be significant revenue.
> if only 10% of its users buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150m a year
My points, summarised:
1. As someone who is extremely familiar with Apple's business, MFI looks like it's as much about minimising costs and preserving CSAT than driving revenue.
2. We can at least infer that even if the ludicrous (sorry) assumptions you've made are true, we're talking about a business line which contributes less than 1% to Apple's bottom line. The total revenue generated by MFI is likely to be far, far less than that: I imagine in the order of $80m USD a year, on a company which -- again -- does $250 BILLION a year of revenue.
The crux of my argument is: Apple does not care sufficiently about selling you cables and dongles to derange engineering decisions on their products. Nobody at Apple is saying "let's not switch to USB-C because we can keep making money from MFI and lightning dongles."
People constantly make this bullshit claim that Apple makes engineering decisions so that they can sell you a dongle or a cable, and it's so patently illogical that nobody should feel happy repeating it.
>The total revenue generated by MFI is likely to be far, far less than that
Since you are talking about "revenue" and not profits, I can assure you the world sells more than 80M MFi lightning cable per year.
There are absolute number, hundreds of millions, or there are relative numbers. 1%. Just to make a point, AMD only earn a Net Income or 300M this year.
The same argument could have made for Apple to provide more iCloud Storage for Free, Which they wont.
Can you please substantiate why you believe there to be zero expenditure associated with the MFI program? The MFI certification team at Apple do not work for free.
Maybe it doesn't matter to most people anymore, but these ports are for more than charging. This regulation could stifle using this port for other features. That said, it's pretty obvious where everything is going (wireless), so it's not clear to me that this regulation will matter too much either way.
I recognise that, but I once again point to our experience with non-standardised cables in the past. In theory, those cables could have introduced new capabilities. In practice, they really didn't. Cables got much better after standardisation, and the USB Group have proven to be substantially more motivated to advance standards than any of the manufacturers ever were.
I believe it is the customer who will pay the fine. The manufacturers may have a different number of sales due to the higher price that the customer will have to pay.
I want to agree. But then I realize how any times a day I'm forced to dismiss pesky cookie warnings, and I wonder what unintended consequences will arise from this cable ruling too.
Sure, none come to mind right now, but then, I never though I'd be groaning past two dozen cookie dialogs per day, either.
I don't understand how you can think this is needed in the slightest unless you literally can't make a decision yourself. I'm sorry but you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. This just simply isn't a problem, it's not a quality of life issue. It's just not. Buy cables with breakout mini, c, and tbunderbolt for 5$. Solved.
This type of regulation will kill the west. The amount of money and waste it cost to create this regulation will far exceed any value it ever adds in terms of measurable productivity.
Not to mention that innovation is killed with this type of approach... USB standards change for reasons..
But hey I'm glad you can borrow 100% of all of your friends cables to charge your phone rather than 90% today.... ️
I don’t mean to imply that you’re young, but to say what you just said implies that you didn’t live the life of mobile phones pre-2004 (when the EU charging directive came in).
Not only was every phone manufacturer having their own charger, often they would have different charging ports between models or product categories within the same brand!
The landscape you’re describing now exists precisely because of this directive.
And manufacturers can evolve to new chargers (like USB-C instead of micro-b, we saw this happen) it’s just that manufacturers have to agree amongst themselves.
I was around when cell phones were invented. The peripheral standard developed naturally in the manufacturing industry far before the EU commission. Frankly imo, the EU commission in the 90s had far less impact and was taken far less seriously than today. To credit. Gov with USB industry standard deployment is laughable.
No it doesn't. The industry was developing USB and standardized it for power before the EU Commission started caring about this. What happened would have happened anyway due to economies of scale.
Development of a standard does not nearly equate to deployment of a standard.
There are open standards for instant communication. How many proprietary protocols and implementations exist? How many are so widely adopted?
Contrast that with open ones.
There’s quite a lot of money in peripherals; it’s also a neat way of obsoleting older phones. Broken custom chargers were usually the reason I stopped using a phone; meaning I bought a new one.
Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother developing their own proprietary charging and cable standards, and as they proved, the regulation is toothless: they simply shipped a cheap adapter nobody cared about or used and that was the regulation solved.
I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work.
As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea.
Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.
You’re inferring something that isn’t true. The EU is not “good” or “bad” it just “is”.
They do good things and bad things, however there’s a very clear delineation between pre-2004 and post-2004. It is very clear that even if it is not a direct cause then it is at least a large push.
USB as a a standard existed for sure, but rarely if ever used on phones. (The only phone I can think of is the RAZR and that was actually a huge selling point)
I remember hearing about the directive when I had a new Sony w300i (which is a phone that came out in 2006!)
When? The MoU was signed in 2009. USB has been delivering power for much longer than that.
This claim the EU politely requested the whole tech industry to develop a standardised power cable and they leapt into action because such a brilliant idea had never occurred to anyone before doesn't match the timelines of the actual tech development. USB was around a long time, was happening anyway and the non-binding MoU the EU demanded firms sign had no impact on the only firm that still wanted to do their own cable, as Apple's actions proved quite directly.
To re-emphasise the point, if the EU had passed binding regulations like this at an earlier stage in its life we might have never had MagSafe. Or we might have ended up standardising on barrel connectors.
> you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store.
And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple.
If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations.
I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.
Sounds like every other phone should actually switch to lightning to solve your mini jack issue. The prevalence of iPhone-ready cables proves that the ubiquity of iPhone cables is adequate- maybe even better than USB C in some markets.
>And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple.
Um... No. It has nothing to do with that EU standardisation. The USB converged on all Android SmartPhone was because it was cheap, and it transfer Data fairly fast. Which was the De-Facto Standard on PC.
I'm not sure you understand how the situation was before manufacturers standardised on micro USB.
Back then, you usually had zero chance of finding a compatible cable with your phone unless your went to a specialized store. Different models by the same manufacturer had different cables, even different versions of the same model often had different cables as well.
Lightning is best remembered for being such ancient technology that already in the year of its release, the connector was incapable of providing enough bandwidth for even a modest 1080p video signal.
This eventually forced Apple into creating a lossy Lightning-to-HDMI adapter that would receive low bitrate h264 from your professional use iPad and decode it into its final artifact riddled form for output on HDMI.
> The original iPhone cable, then lightning, then wireless charging.
It's also worth noting that Apple began the move from Lightning to USB-C charging on iOS devices in 2018. The next generation of iPhones won't use Lightning.
EDIT: The point is that Apple's been moving to standards-based charging for both macOS and iOS products for some time, making this EU effort even less necessary than it may first appear.
Yes but why is it so bad to let companies choose what charging cables they provide?
You get a free charging cable usually when you purchase a new phone and charging cables are cheap.
I get the environment argument but I don't see how this moves the needle on protecting the environment. If anything it could scare off tech companies from developing charging cables that are better for the environment.
> You get a free charging cable usually when you purchase a new phone
"Free". It's amazing how many consumers see it this way. When everyone has the same charger phone companies can actually start putting it in as an optional paid add-on, which virtually no consumer will take. The hypothetical environment argument is spurious at best.
Um... may be because the median Smartphone cycle is now 3 - 4 years in most countries and it would not be bad to have a new Chargers and new cables put to work?
Arguably not Charger, but you do get the possibility of improved charger or higher power charging. But all cables wear out. So not really wrong with providing it by default.
I carry two phones, my private Android phone (my personal preference) and an iPhone imposed on me by work. Not having to bother with two sets of cables would be a welcome improvement.
As for "not moving the needle", every little thing sums up. Also, it's not just the cables - manufacturing lines, shelf space, redundant labor, ...
I’m pretty sure that using two phones offsets any environmental savings from a single cable by quite a bit. Who knows when the EU will crack down on that kind of splurging?
I mean, I know from the American cultural point of view, government intervention is like a last resort, and you have to prove that it's absolutely necessary in order to apply it. Government is seen as an enemy and every one of its actions seen as a potential limiter of freedom, hence the right to bear arms (I hope it never becomes necessary, I suspect guns vs. drones and missiles wouldn't be a very fair fight).
But we are talking about an EU directive here. As an European, if the government makes regulations that make life more convenient for me (and other citizens), that's amazing, it's what I'm voting and paying them for. And I think most Europeans would see it that way.
Because it would be more convenient for everyone who has ever or will ever own more than one phone, or ever upgrade their phone. Imagine if you needed an adapter to refuel your car, or to plug an electric device into a wall. Genuinely, how is this any different?
We’ve seen what happens when corporations can’t get their shit together - VHS/Beta Blu-ray/HD-DVD - the market decided. We didn’t need government to mandate a standard.
That's an obnoxious and immature way to jump into a conversation. I didn't touch on government action anywhere, nor the comment I was responding to.
I understood the parent post as arguing that having a unique cable isn't so bad because you get one for free with the device, among other things. While this is true, my counter is that having a single cable over multiple devices is still nice.
Making life convenient is kind of one of the things that governments should do for their citizens. And intervention is the only way to make that XKCD strip about standards not true.
OK, so do you want them to make life harder? Or just sit around? Because I prefer it when they actually do something for the ordinary citizen. Fortunately we didn't have Reagan here in Europe, so we still care about ordinary citizens.
That's what big business would like you to think, so that you leave them alone. Truth is, the government is the only thing with power that may actually give a damn about you, even if just to get re-elected. Business cares about the bottom line only. Workers' rights, the environment, convenience? All don't matter if they hurt the bottom line.
Yes businesses care about the bottom line - but the only way they make money is by selling things that people want.
The government should be involved in regulating where there are negative externalities. Negative externalities are not - I don’t like having two cables.
Also politicians care about what the majority wants. As long as you’re part of that majority you’re fine. But if you aren’t - the last thing you want is more government power.
Businesses don’t have the ability to take away my property or liberty. The government does. Given a choice between the two, Id rather the government have less power.
Please make yourself familiar with a bit more modern economic theories. The belief that the unregulated market moves things to an optimum for all participants has been proven to be wrong by modern game theory. Not all economic games have their equilibrium at the optimum for consumers.
I leave open if this particular intervention on chargers is beneficial for the public or not, but you will have to argue about chargers to make a point, not about governments and markets.
And taking a look at history - even recent history. The government definitely doesn’t move things in an optimum way for all participants.
The difference is that businesses don’t have the power of the state to compel me to buy their products. I can change phones a lot easier than I can change governments.
Again, you need to show specifically that a uniform charger is less beneficial to consumers than letting Apple keep their proprietary patent-protected charger.
I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.
I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.
This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.
What I am saying is simple. Giving the government more power without a compelling reason is always detrimental. Making things a little more convenient is not compelling.
But why stop at the connector? Why not force Apple to make AirDrop, FaceTime interoperable? Why not force Apple to port iCloud backups to Android or force Apple to allow backups to third party providers?
I think we have to agree to disagree. I assume that you are not living in the EU. Our experiences here with governmental regulation are not so bad. Companies are complaining, but consumers are not.
Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.
And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.
No countries did not regulate mobile phone transmissions. The US licenses bandwidth to different companies but did not legislate the protocols. That’s why in the US you had things like push to talk and Sprints aborted 4G non LTE protocol. The market killed it - not the government.
As far as not being able to escape, before 2007-2010, everyone feared the Windows lock-in, technology and the market made that not as big of a fear. Before that it was IBM.
By the time the slow moving government finally made a decision about IBM’s mainframe monopoly that it started in the 60s - in the mid 80s - the market had made the case irrelevant.
As far as everyone liking the files of the EU - see Brexit.
Windows was lock-in in late 90s and early 2000s. That was not only a fear. EU forced Microsoft to open Windows during that time. And that was a good thing. I don't want to wait decades until that stuff is sorted out by obsolescence.
Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?
However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)
EU had no affect on the browser wars. How do you explain that Chrome took over in the US. Again, Google made a better browser while Microsoft was sleep at the wheel.
Microsoft is just as dominant with Office and desktop PCs as it was in the 90s. The web and then mobile just made the desktop less relevant.
Of course, everybody can interpret history as they like. The fine handed out by EU to Microsoft was of course also a deterrent against further similar attempts, and Microsoft afterwards changed their tactics not only in EU, but world-wide. Or did you not get the Windows browser choice menu in US?
No we not did not get the Browser choice in the US. That’s kind of the perfect control to show that government policy didn’t have any effect. Chrome took over in both markets.
Also it wasn’t the choice of browsers that made Windows less relevant. It was that everything moving to the web made Windows less relevant and that gave to the rise of the modern mobile platforms now that you could do everything on the web that most people cared about and then the app economy.
What do you really think had a bigger impact on even IE losing marketshare, browser choice or the most popular website destination - Google - giving prime advertising real estate to Chrome and Google bundling Chrome with third party apps left and right?
We also see from FB that the little fines that governments hand out don’t stop corporations from behaving in a way that the government doesn’t like.
Amazing how free will works isn’t it? You as a competent adult are able to judge products and make decisions about tradeoffs and you didn’t need the government to help you do it.
If Apple saw that enough customers switch to Android because of the cable they would change - free markets are amazing.
Hang on though, the point is that the market isn’t able to address this issue.
There aren’t two platforms with equal privacy available but differing power connectors.
I’m forced to prioritise privacy over proprietary connectivity.
If all things were equal then I could vote with my wallet and I’m sure the market would fix this... but all things aren’t equal so market isn’t going to solve this problem.
In that situation you need an external authority to set a standard.
Because a government full of people who know nothing about technology must be the right answer. What other areas of the iPhone should the government force Apple to standardize? FaceTime? AirDrop? iOS itself?
Everything where high interoperability is more beneficial for consumers than proprietary solutions by individual companies. As a rule of thumb, everything where standardization brings more benefits to consumers than innovation.
Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.
It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.
So it would be more beneficial that Apple is forced to make FaceTime interoperable and all messaging platforms. Should the government enforce that too?
It’s perfectly possible to have sensible hardware standards where doing so will not impede the market without insisting that all software be also standardised.
For the record I think it would be useful for Apple to have the built in Facetime client be able to communicate with other phone platforms. I don’t think Apple should be compelled to offer that currently.
Let’s say back in the day when Apple has the Apple Desktop Bus for low speed peripherals and Nubus for cards, would you also have been in favor of the government forcing Apple to use PS/2 and ISA?
The Android market is just like the PC market of old - a slow moving race to the bottom. Even today, most low end Android phones are still using Micro USB.
I have a hard time understanding the question. If something is overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone, I don't mind at all if market or government make it happen. I just want it to happen.
Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.
But there is never anything that is “beneficial for everyone” and the government does in the best case what is beneficial to their specific voters - even if it is detrimental to others. There is a very high bar for me to say that the government should step in. A powerful Government is more harmful than a powerful business.
Apple forces everyone to use their own browser engine , their own marketplace no free will there. Competent adult can not judge products on their own, they can only install Apple approved ones!.
If only competent adult are able to judge products and make decisions about tradeoffs and you didn’t need the government to help you do it would be able to install whatever they want.
You can't have it both way dude unless you think Apple is afraid and going to loose money which might bring down the stock value.
If I buy a game console, I have to choose between what the platform offers and the trade offs. I don’t need the nanny state to tell Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft how to build their platforms.
85% of the world chooses Android. If you want to choose your browser, you are free to choose Android also.
But if I switch to apple I have to throw out my cables, too.
Maybe try to look at this differently: is your life better for the fact that when you travel you need to bring power plug adapters? If cars had different gas plugs that required different gas stations, would that be nice?
You would rather trust public usb cables? Of course you should bring your own chargers.... so long as that port has a data connection to the most personal device you own, you should probably own the hardware that plugs into it.
And there is no government mandate for cars to have a standard gas plug. Car manufactures know that it would make the car less desirable in the market.
But in fact, you can sell a car with non standard methods of making it move - see Tesla. They didn’t have to wait for the nanny state or other manufacturers to agree on a standard before it started shipping cars.
Apple is the only company that defied the EU. The fact that we have 2 standard cables (apple and USB) instead of the past's 15+ is solving 99% of the problem.
The regulation set out to do something and the problem is basically solved. It worked.
> The original iPhone cable, then lightning, then wireless charging
I was under the impression that Apple was behind the curve on wireless. My wife and I bought our phones at around the same time, her iPhone doesn't have wireless, my Android does.
Bear in mind, not all Android do; that was one reason I didn't buy the Pixel when I bought my phone; no wireless charging was a deal breaker.
Apple was a bit "late," iPhone 8 (2017) started it, but they still sold (and maybe still sell?) plenty of phones that don't support it. Earlier on things kind of coalesced around 2 separate charging standards; Qi and PMA. Starbucks went all-in on PMA. I don't think I've seen a Starbucks with any wireless charing in years. So there were some big investments in the "wrong" tech.
I'm with you and Apple on this, this is the kind of law that is abusive and hinders innovation. This is the stupid kind of law that was voted in hyper bureaucracies such as the Soviet Union. In fact I have hard time believing the EU is "liberal" at that point, it's just a new elite trying to find reasons to sustain itself and grow out of proportion. *
The majority of phones use (micro) USB for charging, only Apple and a few others use a different format, and people who can afford Apple devices can afford buying a charger just for that device.
I still don't quite understand what this actually means, and frankly I'm not certain that the politicians understand it either.
Is it just on the connector? Is it the charger plug? Amount of wires in the cable? Cable gauge? Power rating? Proprietary charging protocols?
If everything about charging portable devices must be truly universal, then every single piece of the puzzle must be the same for everyone. Sure, Apple is the most prominent example because they use a different connector, but should things like Qualcomm's proprietary charging protocols not also be banned then? Unless they're willing to license it for free to everyone
How much power should the chargers be rated for? 5W, 18W, 50W? Different devices have different power requirements, so should we just have all chargers rated at the max that the spec allows for?
Just because the connector is the same also does not mean that the devices will actually work together, lightning cables already have the requirement of MFI certification from Apple, and they could probably do the exact same over a USB-C cable.
I don't think they work at that level of detail that high up, they just vote "make it universal" and then a bunch of other regulatory bodies need to setup the exact requirements and negotiate them.
We had the 30 pin dock connector on iPods and iPhones for eleven years and now lightning for eight.
Forcing people to throw away most of a decade's worth of already purchased cables and accessories does seem like an odd way to cut down on ewaste given the fact that Apple already switched the chargers themselves to USB-C.
I guess my lightning compatible alarm clock/docking station can go live on a nice farm with my long gone 30 pin alarm clock/dock, where they can both run and play.
This is a bit of the chicken and egg problem. People will have to throw away accessories because those aren't standards in the first place. Does it still make sense to allow this when there's no technical reason?
I think it was a mistake that the 2009 directive was not mandatory, it would have avoided device like the one you mention being vendor locked in the first place.
When they decided to make the iPod PC compatible we ended up with a connector that was passing through FireWire, USB, audio, playback controls, and the kitchen sink.
After a certain point, they started passing through video as well.
Apple has been trying out cables and transfer types over the years (thunderbolt, CD-ROM, USB, wireless) and they do it on the backs of the luxury users, not too far off from what the luxury car makers in testing what to propagate downstream.
Apple has set a standard to use their cable format, which works. If you go through the litany of USB-B there were power issues, transfer rates, and a whole host of other items that, while it met the standard, did not work. An example is my Barnes & Noble Nook needing a special cable to work with the PC; it was USB-B, but not using the right transfer and power source rendered cables useless for interface.
If anyone can say the roll out of USB-C has been better, even with the “standard” then there have been a number of articles on here that have pointed to fake cables, horrible QC and other items.
So, a government agency has taken the draconian step of forcing a standard, one which will be helpful for the European companies that produce phones and people wonder why there is so much money in politics.
It is absolutely not,in any way or form.Charger is only second to a power plug.My TV, router, washing machine and hair dryer use the same type of plug to get electricity from a socket. It's 2020 and yet we argue how it's beneficial to have x types of phones with z types of connections...Come on!
Electrical plugs also haven’t had any real innovations since the ground wire. I hope to see innovations in power/data cables to cellphones more frequently than that!
Edit: even if the innovations is just faster data transfer and more power.
Electrical plugs have evolved besides adding a ground wire, at least in the EU. The most recent improvement is that most new outlets are now child-save (while staying compatible with legacy plugs).
And I think that it‘s a good thing that things don’t change all the time!
Our electronic devices that we use regularly need 4 different chargers! I‘m looking forward to the day when it‘s all just going to be USB-C.
It's my experience that monitors, routers, speakers, and other devices often have non-standardized connectors. At the very least there are many different barrel connectors with different sizes, voltages, and amperages.
This law doesn't forbid any innovative technology, it just mandate there is at least one way to charge phones with a standard charger. It can be an adapter, a second port or whatever solution they find.
I'll miss lightning when it's gone if only because it was the most satisfying and secure feeling cable connection I've ever used. USB-C has some slack built into it by design but it just makes it feel lower quality.
The USB-C ports wear out badly after a couple years of use and are loose. Lightning, as you are saying, still feels good after years of daily use. The duty cycle is higher for lightning and should be used for things which are often disconnected and reconnected like mobile devices.
I've used the same USB c charging port in my phone for 2 years without any noticeable wear. I did, however, need to scrape out accumulated pocket lint with a safety pin on two occasions. Are you sure there isn't lint in the port you're basing your assertions on?
Former IT person here who deployed fleets of MacBooks with those damn dreaded USB-C ports. If you have "normal use" of the ports then you might not notice the low duty cycle but in an office where people are constantly plugging into their docks, dongles for AV equipment, Ethernet adapters for VoIP, and traveling it became a major headache. More wear than typical maybe, but certainly not abnormal.
On average, over the life of the device, every device needed to be sent to Apple to replace worn ports. Some unlucky sales people managed 2 or 3 trips to Apple. The annoying bit is that the turnaround time isn't exactly fast so we ended up provisioning the affected people new machines and then throwing the refurbs back in the rotation.
We never heard a peep from the Dells we also deployed that had a USB-C port for the dock, HDMI ports for the AV, and a dedicated port for charging. I like the idea of one port for all but they're just not strong enough.
Not the parent commenter, and I am not sure if there is lint in the port of my lightning powered devices, but I am confident that I have never had to clean it out to make it charge.
I had to clean out the lightning port on my iPhone 6 constantly, it was awful. With the XS I almost exclusively use wireless charging because of that experience.
Cannot comment regarding iPhone 6 specifically, as I had been using Android phones after iPhone 4 up until XS generation came out. It might be that Apple has upgraded the lightning port tech over all those years between iPhone 6 and XS, but that's just a guess.
The USB flavors and so many others have a little plastic tongue on the female side which I think is the source of the alignment sensitivity and fragility issues. Lightning, headphone jacks, and RJ45 have a purely concave port which I much prefer.
edit: and if there has to be a weak point it should be on the cable side, not on the port side.
For USB-C, the weak point is on the cable side. For Lightning, it's on the device side (little golden contact springs). The lightning plug feels like it's made for eternity, I must say though.
My laptop has USB-C charging and already the cable doesn't fit properly ($1,200 machine). I've tried cleaning it and blasting it with air - so annoying. Have on-site service so may have them come out to figure out what is going on.
I'm not someone who's shy about regulation, but even I think this is totally unnecessary. As an Apple user, I should be the first to complain about their own internal (inexplicable) lack of a standard (Lightning for phones, USB-C for everything else). It's annoying, sure, but it's far from a material burden on my quality of life.
Is this really the problem we need to be spending our regulatory energies on in 2020?
Yes, because that regulation effort started ten years ago and led to less ewaste, something which we can all agree is good.
Remember the time each new phone model had a new charger?
And you had to replace the whole charger if the cable was broken?
That changed because ten years ago the EU forced the companies to change their way and I think it didn't stiffle innovation but made developing a good standard even more important which lead to usb C.
Of course it should be the default to keep it that way, but it seems companies need to have someone looking over their shoulders and regulate them to be sane.
Why does this keep coming up as if the EU law was the reason why all non-Apple Smartphone used USB?
It is not, and the EU law has very little ( if anything ) to do with it. What you describe as different charger and cables were before the Smartphone era.
The EU regulatory bodies are full time fully funded bodies whose job is to keep developing regulations. It is not like you and I who are trying solve each problem as it comes up and move on. Their job is to find problems to solve first. If they get harder and harder to find they look harder and harder or lower the bar.
I'd be happier if as much thought had gone into better system layering to allow Android kernels etc. to be kept updated. There must be some opportunity cost for humanity to have planned obsolescence over billions of mobile phones.
Every time you are buying a charger, wired headphones or any other iPhone accessory, Apple collects a hefty license fee and you, indirectly, are paying it.
Originally, the lightning port was a big improvement over existing tech. Currently though, the only reason the lightning port still exists is because it is a good way for Apple to use their market dominant position to milk consumers. It is not good for consumers, it is also not good for the environment. It is good just for Apple.
It is generally the job of the govt to prevent these types of abuses. Is this particular law worded the right way for that? Maybe, maybe not, but it will do the job for this particular case.
I suspect a major factor in keeping the Lightning stuff is also because of how intense the complaining would be if they switched it to USB-C. The introduction of Lightning got endless negative PR over all the old 30-pin accessories, and this would be that plus the extra complaining about how they keep "constantly" changing it.
For similar reasons, I suspect there's at least some factions in Apple that would be secretly pleased with a mandated switch to USB-C, because then they'd be able to get past it by redirecting any complaints to the government involved.
It's not quite an apt comparison because the vast majority of people already own USB-C chargers and accessories, whereas lightning was a brand new thing.
Also if Apple were that bothered by complaining, it would not have taken them 5 years and 3+ years of service programs to replace their laptops' butterfly keyboards with regular scissors switch keyboards.
The vast majority? I suspect that is very very wrong. I own a single device that has a USB C port, and no peripherals that connect to it without an adapter, and I post on HN. It is very early for USBC yet.
So, you found a phone released in 2017. From Huawei. Super cheap. That isn't even sold in the US. Where all the reviews read:
"Honor 7X has the distinction of being one of the last phones to feature a micro USB port for charging instead of USB-C. Blame the price if you must..."
But if Apple is being “abusive” by having proprietary hardware, does that mean they should also force Nintendo to use standard media for the Switch? Should they also force Apple to allow iPhones to run a more standard operating system?
We can argue about how many pins are on the head of a needle or we can be more practical and admit that anyone can get a cheap lightning cable from anywhere and that you don’t need the government to insinuate itself in every area of our life unnecessarily.
That makes sense, but usually they aren't so blatant about that sort of thing; usually there's some sort of pretense at least. Especially given how "brave" they've been about pushing USB-C on their laptops; I'd have more sympathy for that if they were at least self-consistent.
But still, despite all of this salt I don't think it warrants legislation.
I think a more appropriate tool would be launching an investigation into why they've stuck with lightning when everyone else (including their other products!) use USB-C. That should essentially prove there is no good reason, other than making money off licensing, without regard to damaging the environment or exploiting the consumer. So they should get a giant fine for it and stop doing it.
But I don't believe there is the legal framework for the EU to do that, so they're trying to get the outcome they want using the tools that they have.
What does this mean in practice? Are Android phone makers going to have to license the Lightning port from Apple? Or is the EU going to declare that USB-C is the be all end all of phone plugs?
It sounds like they're trying to standardize the actual chargers, I wonder how that will work USB-PDs many different modes? What about proprietary fast charging schemes? (maybe those already died out after the move to USB-c?).
I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea of a universal standard stifling innovation, so hopefully the EU will be responsive if something better gets invented in the future. I'm guessing that whatever comes after USB-C will exist in the US and Asia for years before its allowed in the EU... which may or may not be a good thing I suppose. USB-C as a plug has so many capabilities.
It's interesting that they're looking at wireless charging too. Other than my toothbrush and an induction stove, I can't remember the last time I saw wireless charging that wasn't Qi. The only exception is some of the experimental room-scale charging startups. I suppose they're already fighting against the laws of physics, the laws of the EU can't be that much worse.
> Are Android phone makers going to have to license the Lightning port from Apple? Or is the EU going to declare that USB-C is the be all end all of phone plugs?
It looks more like the latter. After all, Apple is the odd one out now.
”I'm guessing that whatever comes after USB-C will exist in the US and Asia for years before its allowed in the EU”
Looking at what happened with RoHS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst... the EU forbid the use of lead-based solder, and the world mostly followed because, if they didn’t, the logistics and lower economies of scale would cost more than using the cheaper processes), it will have to be a lot better to make it worthwhile to manufacturers to completely replace their charging connector by something newer.
I think it’s more likely ‘USB’ will remain the sticker on whatever comes next, with enough backwards compatibility to satisfy EU regulations.
(‘USB’ is a marketing term, anyways. Current USB looks nothing like the first version)
>‘USB’ is a marketing term, anyways. Current USB looks nothing like the first version
How so? You can plug a first gen, USB 1.0 mouse into an Android phone's USB-C port with no more than a passive adapter, and it'll work. That's way more commonality than "just a marketing term" - it's functionally backwards compatible at the electrical, protocol, and driver level.
USB1:USB-C is a bit like 8086:x64. The latter ‘boots’ pretending to be the former, but preferably doesn’t spend much time in that mode.
USB1: 4 wires, half-duplex, with the host in control. Upstream- and downstream ports determine who’s the host. Negotiation of bus speed in hardware, using a few diodes/wires.
I suspect that in the future - years from now, probably over a decade - Europe will not be a primary target audience for electronics, but even more will be designed for Asian markets. We already see many phones not released outside of China or the asian continent.
Heavy handed laws will only increase how fast they get left behind as a targeted market.
About a year ago someone posted a "Look at the cool stuff I bought/saw on my trip to Shenzen" blog post and one of the items featured was a bastardized Chinese USB-C and Lightening cable that technically met neither spec but worked with either. I think you'll see a lot of those for sale.
I have no idea. I figure they got creative with the shape of the female sockets and the amount they can move freely within the connector body but that's just an educated guess.
It may be legitimate when the regulated action causes direct physical harm to someone else. For example: I think it's reasonable to regulate particulate emissions.
It's not legitimate to regulate manufacture or commercialization of products when that manufacture or commercialization poses no direct threat to the physical well-being of other individuals.
Why draw the line at physical well-being? Why should it be fine to waste someone's time, cost them money, even destroy them emotionally, so long as you don't directly physically harm them?
Because it's a clear delineation point. Physical harm is much easier to observe. Emotional harm is a definition that would lead to too many false positives.
Because physicality is what defines if people are free or not, and freedom is the only moral principle that a reasonable, moral society can be based upon. If you forsake freedom, you might as well forget about morality altogether.
Regulating emotions is arbitrary. Maybe it makes me sad that you post comments on HN. Should your comments be regulated?.
Physical harm is where you draw the line, because it's the only line that makes sense.
People starve, while they could have just photosynthesize physically all they want. smh!
/s ... but seriously, yes, somehow claiming physical stuff is clean got popular, probably because of our intuition about the world, but it wasn't the case since people stsrted engaging in politics, trade, rituals, shaming each other for various reasons, invented organized religion, and so on.
Though of course regulating emotions is a silly reductio ad absurdum, but there are a lot of steps between physical harm and woke feels. Such as monetary damages as determined by a court for things like discrimination, abuse of market position, libel/slander.
Because, as the Romans put it, de minimis non curat lex.
We are talking about law, not social expectation. It's not at all fine to waste someone's time, cost them money, destroy them emotionally, or insult their mother.
Because in this case the consumer is choosing to waste their own time and their own money. If the charging situation is so terrible people are free to buy other phones.
Yes, that is in fact my argument, what is your counter?
Regulations are centered around equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. People are not the same. Regions are not the same. They have localized, nuanced for better or worse problems and solutions. It's crazy to have completely separate input factors and expect the same outcome..
Also whats best for me is rarely ever universal. People really love to jump on the wagon for things like universal Healthcare in the states. You don't need Healthcare in your 20s. Most people don't, they need something like a disaster insurance with high deductables so that if it turns out they are in the statistical minority and get cancer in their 20s they do t get fucked. They don't need regular subsidized hospital visits they pay thousands of dollars I insurance premiums for so they can have a 20$ year checkup... It's
The idea here is that "of we regulate it people will have access to safer livelihoods" the reality is that you are raising the barrier to entry for that particular lifestyle and in effect reducing lower class socio economic accessibility. Just because the feds mandate all new cars have backup cams doesn't mean people can afford the costs associated with it. People should have the ability to leverage risk to better their financial well being. Anything else and you have no class mobility and no autonomy.
I live in a country with universal health care. I haven't seen my doctor in 3-4 years. And last time I saw him it was because the flu or a particularly nasty cold.
People pay a fixed percent of their income into the HC system.
Furthermore, while you are attending school (university, college, whatever), you are automatically covered.
There was a small token copay system for a few years about 10 years ago, that helped to cut down wait queues. (It was something like 2USD for each visit, because there was a sentiment, that too many people went to the doctor unnecessarily.)
There are of course possible ways to optimize it a lot more by incentivizing healthy lifestyle choices (eg. risk weighted additional premium to counter obesity, smoking, drinking, etc).
The effect on mobility is nothing since it's a percentage "tax".
Autonomy is nice, but cleaning up uninsured carcasses also has a cost, so autonomous folks should at least prepay that.
Proved my point. If it costs 100$ to not be desperately poor, and you make 100$ and the Gov takes 60% of your 100$ you still only have 40$. Doesn't matter if the tax is a flat % or not you still don't have the money to not be poor. All so that you could visit the doctor 1 every 5 years for a flue without having to pay..
Alternatively If you lived freely, you could make 100$, decide you pay 60$for insurance if you want to feel safer and get the benefits from that service orrrr you could say "man I don't need that service right now in my life, so I'm going to invest that money instead while I'm young" and then not be poor..
Yea 50 years ago when nobody had health insurance the bodies piling up were a burden on society because everyone was dying because nobody could afford medical treatment..
I seem to have missed your excellent syllogism, but how have you reached the conclusion that it costs a 100 bucks to be not poor?
Plus I already live quite freely, thanks.
I have no problem with having an option for people that would need to pay only when the need arises. (And they would pay full price, go into debt, or they would be euthanized if they haven't paid at least X years of HC insurance plus they have no money, nor any reasonable chance of making some after recovery.) That would be a nice natural experiment.
"The only reason this happened is that one company refuses to play ball"
No, not at all.
It happened because legislators in the EU don't understand tech, don't understand re-cycling, don't understand the industry, but they all use iPhones+Androids and wonder why 'there are so many goddam cables'. It's a very specific problem that just happens to be visceral and immediate with the people in charge: they can all relate to it. So they want to 'do something' and 'legislation' is what they do.
It's the wrong approach I hope cooler heads prevail.
Haha, I've been around when tech-illiterate regulators from the EU weren't around to stymie innovation in the oh-so important field of power connectors.
In fact, I still have a box full of wall-warts from at least 5 phone manufacturers, and not one would fit on a different maker's phone. In fact, for some producers, the power plugs were even different for different models.
>All wall warts that came with any Apple Phone or iPad I ever used are still usable because they are USB.
Which is totally not a coincidence because back then, the EU was pondering forcing a common standard down producer's side.
I still have a Apple FireWire-wall wart from my old iPod, though. Again not a coincidence. It resides in the box with all the fondly-remembered Nokia- and Siemens plugs from the same time.
If you think this legislation will solve the problem, you're misunderstanding the situation broadly.
'Those days' of 'many connectors' will not go away, they'll just be another layer of weird multifaceted connectors, confusion, and lawsuits with respect to the actual meaning of the legislation.
With respect to sustainability, even perfectly formulated legislation will have zero impact on the amount we recycle.
They understand it just fine, and are the main reason that every phone model doesn't have it's own proprietary connectors like in the feature phone days.
I thought all these EU tech regulations might do some good
But now when I arrive at any website I have to accept cookie policy, then I have to accept that they will invade my privacy and log my data (or waste half an hour un-checking boxes) and only then can I get down to the business of not signing up to their newsletter and not downloading their app.
Maybe this is simpler but tech companies seem to find loopholes faster than they can be closed and we just get stuck in the middle with a crap version of what we had before.
Those are dark patterns on the part of the webmasters of those sites though.
They want to make it as hard for you to protect your privacy as possible. It’s the same reason they bug you install an app instead of using the web. In an app you have even less control.
Notice the number of sites that have an enable all but no disable all button?
Thing is if they’re using dark patterns at this stage how can you trust the content of the page you’re trying to view?
The alternative is much worse which every company tracking you with your consent. It was scary to see what data Facebook collects on you if you are logged out.
I suspect the EU will introduce new legislation in due course, but of course, they are heavily lobbied too by the tech industry, so it may take some time.,
Facebook still are tracking us all though because they’ve just dark-patterned their way around the regulation. So we have the same data sharing, and now I’m annoyed every time I get to a website.
I’m not arguing for a return to what we had. Just pointing out that what we have does not work yet.
Plus lots of companies are clearly in breach - like when they say ‘by continuing to use this site you agree to the terms and conditions’ this is not active consent. But nothing is done.
I'd say more that the majority I've seen have been proper, and the nonproper ones I've just not looked at and backed out. Not like I'm starved for reading choice.
> But now when I arrive at any website I have to accept cookie policy, then I have to accept that they will invade my privacy and log my data (or waste half an hour un-checking boxes)
If you have to uncheck the boxes, the site is not GDPR compliant.
GDPR says that consent have to be given explicitly, not implicitly with an explicit opt-out option.
Thus the EU has massively reduced online tracking, and that is great.
The EU regulations are doing one good thing: they are giving a small competitive advantage to companies that don't track you. For example, I've stopped using Google search, because I had enough of the creepy tracking on Google. I rarely watch Youtube videos anymore, because I don't want to click the consent button.
Some companies might start to rethink if they really need all this tracking technology. For example, I've removed Google Analytics from all sites that I was responsible for when the GDPR went into effect. I've decided that the potential liablility, and the inconvenience for the user was just not worth the small upside of knowing how many people clicked which link.
I've also stopped including tracking pixels in email newsletters, and I've also convinced others to stop using Google Analytics.
With the GDPR, you now at least know that some websites are going to do everything to track you, and it's an informed choice.
This needs to be enforced better, because all these pop-ups with "Accept | click 175 checkboxes to opt out" are illegal.
The adtech/publishing industry is beyond belief. Instead of reducing 3rd party tracking, they've just added another 3rd party used to track whether they have consent to track you. And then they still track you even if you don't agree, because all that code is crap and/or they don't care.
What a load of bad faith from Apple to argue "against waste". Their latest Macbooks only have USB-C slots, meaning one now needs to discard perfectly good USB-A/HDMI/Thunderbolt (the last one being a port that they were the major force behind) devices, or at least buy adapters.
My brother remarked recently: "What's the point of having thin laptops, if you have to carry a book-size hub with you." (Which is also the reason people might be tempted to wastefully discard USB-A peripherals in favour of USB-C alternatives.)
The message that it sends to companies that don't play ball, and sort something out voluntarily between themselves that is in consumers' best interests (and by this I mean Apple), will be worth it.
"an expensive legislative bill" was not the first recourse to "how we solve that problem". But it is a necessary fallback.
As far as I remember, this piece of legislation has been floating around since USB mini. We have now gone through 2 revisions to a connector that is now reversible and can carry video. Locking onto USB-C now could be a very "640k ought to be enough for everybody" moment.
And if Apple was going to switch to USB C anyways, whats the point of this legislation?
There are now low power ports (only enough for phones), high power ports (good for laptops), and full-on data ports (which create malware risks, and may or may not support your use case). There are good reasons these should not look alike nor fit together.
>If there is a reasonable need for upgraded standard
Are you saying that politicians should be designing technical standards? And how will you ever know there is a need for a new standard if you can't even deploy it?
It's not like this is something new. We've had national standards for things like AC power plugs and outlets for over a century, and they are mandatory in many countries.
Apple isn't going to change to USB-C anytime soon for iPhones because they make a significant amount of money with the MFI program (~$4/connector), the vast majority of which comes from lightning accessories.
Apple licenses the connector and validates it via a chip.
I entirely get what you're saying. But the chip is counterfeit, so the company doesn't pay the licensing cost, that's why the cable is "so cheap". Nothing to do with audiophile-esque tendencies. More that your 5 pack of cables would cost $14+(5*$4, the current license price) if it were that way.
No-one's disputing that you can buy cheap cables that will work (until they don't, because who knows what else was skimped on), just that you don't in any way shape or form have Apple to thank for that, it's entirely _in spite of_ Apple.
Whether are not the cables are quality or not is different than whether they are licensed. You would make the same decisions if they use USB C with regard to quality.
It’s amazing that the same people who are worried about not having genuine Apple certified cables are probably the same people who want Apple to open up the iPhone to allow side loading.
So now are you saying that you are in favor of Apple’s “Walled garden” to ensure quality? If you are worried about quality cables that must pass some type of certifications doesn’t that argue for proprietary cables where Apple ensures the quality?
Shouldn’t in that case Apple lock down cables more?
I'm not saying I'm in favor of anything, just that you bought some cheap unlicensed chinese garbage off of Amazon doesn't prove that Apple doesn't charge a $4/connector license fee. Amazon is well known for selling piles of counterfeit crap
So it’s counterfeit because it’s not license. What do you think is going to happen when you buy cheap USB C cables?
On one one hand, everyone is arguing that Apple’s proprietary cables are cynical attempt to make money and they shouldn’t have that control and people should have the choice.
Now I am showing you they already have that choice.
USB is also licensed, it's just far cheaper. The USB license is more about making things compatible rather than making money.
> What do you think is going to happen when you buy cheap USB C cables?
I can buy licensed USB-C cables from reputable brands for cheaper than I can buy licensed Lightning cables from reputable brands. And the USB-C cables are more complex to manufacture. One example is Amazon Basics.
> Now I am showing you they already have that choice.
People will always have the choice to buy anything as long as cash exists. But if you want to buy something that is quality, you will look to a reputable brand. A reputable brand will be economically successful, so it is a target for lawsuits, so they will always enter a license. If the license for Lighting costs more than the license for USB, then a consumer who wants to buy a quality cable will always pay more.
> Locking onto USB-C now could be a very "640k ought to be enough for everybody" moment.
I agree in general; but at some point don't we hit diminishing returns? If I were to say, "18.4 exabytes of RAM ought to be enough for everybody", that'd be basically correct, even future-proofing for the craziest sci-fi holodeck use cases we can imagine, right?
I dunno. Having lived through the days where having 128kB of RAM was an eye popping upgrade, you could easily have made the argument back then that 2GB of RAM was future proof for as long as the eye can see.
And in fact, they did. By the time I was reaching adulthood, that was that hard limit built into Win95, give or take boot errors if you had a quarter of that (which was gigantic at the time; 64MB was more than enough to boot it).
Fast forward another 25 years to today, and laptops routinely have 16GB of RAM, and higher end Mac Pros can apparently get a whopping 1.5TB of RAM.
Put another way, the high-end went from .1MB to 1TB in 40 years or so.
I get that we're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, but I'd still be surprised if my grand kids don't have exabytes of RAM or equivalent on whatever the hell their main devices will be by the time they reach adulthood.
I agree in general; but at some point don't we hit diminishing returns? If I were to say, "18.4 exabytes of RAM ought to be enough for everybody", that'd be basically correct, even future-proofing for the craziest sci-fi holodeck use cases we can imagine, right?
But the legislation doesn't lock into something that might happen in the future. It locks the future to what we have today.
As much as I am for interoperability, a legislation directing a specific technology is one way how we end up with ridiculous standards.
Remember, we still have laws on where we can or cannot tie a horse in town on the books a century after they were irrelevant. Laws move in centuries, while technology moves in years. They are not compliant with each other.
I agree; if this law were put to a vote, I would vote against it. I just think it's conceivable that we hit a point where there's very little end-user benefit to additional improvements, and we achieve an equilibrium that essentially solves the given problem[0]. The catch is: we don't necessarily know in advance at what point that will actually be the case (hence the irony of the 640k line, which I'm sure sounded very sensible at the time, just as the 18.4 EB thing sounds very sensible to me now).
[0] One of the reasons that the loss of the headphone jack is so exasperating, is that's an example of an ideal universal connector; it solved the problem so well, there was little reason to improve on it, either in quality or function.
Well, there's the rub: 32 bits for IPv4 was clearly inadequate. IPv6, on the other hand, gives us with 128 bits = 3.4 x 10^38 addresses, which seems from our vantage point like it should cover us until the end of time, even if we colonized the whole galaxy. Is that actually the case? Time will tell. ;)
But that's just the point. When they decided on 32 bits, then it was more than sufficient for the intended use case. If we had stuck to universities and government uses, then we probably still wouldn't have run out.
Things change or evolve, and often in ways not foreseen.
Standardization is like a dream to me, and every time it advances I feel ecstatic. However, it's important to note that standardization must not get in the way of change. Unification does not mean that we can't, in a unified manner, continue to upgrade. At this point in time, this is especially critical to keep in mind, as USB-C is physically flawed - it often becomes loose to the point of losing connection, or even falling out entirely, over time spans as short as one year. This is unacceptable.
I’m a longtime Mac user. The current MacBook range is probably using the most standard plugs of any MacBook range ever. I miss the old way as a range of plugs is a range of options. Currently things can be plugged in that then don’t work and most things seem to require a dongle.
There's 3 parts that I can see to a wired charging situation:
1. the device to be charged
2. something that takes "house" power and does whatever is necessary to convert it for charging purposes
3. a cable between them
It seems to me (who doesn't even own a phone, hah, what an idiot) that (2) already exists in the form of things that plugin to a wall socket and offer 1 or more USB A sockets.
The does leave room for cable waste, as it only pins down 1 end of the cable.
This is point blank the example of 'effete good intentions -> really bad legislation'.
It's really quite bad.
One of the primary motivations cited relates to waste and recycling - however chargers represent an utterly minuscule component of individual waste.
A much better approach from a waste management perspective would be to require that all electronics gear be 'processed' (like batteries). The price of the product 'pre includes' the cost of post-processing, so when it's picked up in its special recycling category, the bit of labour is taken care of.
In fact - this could be applied to a wide variety of products.
As for 'charging standard' - this can only work if it's led by a really smart body, nimble enough to enable innovation and adaptatio, and it's most certainly not the legislative body. The EU could 'empower' such a working group, but should not be getting into the details.
Of course - this legislation will be hacked immediately - everyone will not sell funky multi-adapter chargers with proprietary bits connected to the standard bits. I don't doubt for one second Apple's ability to 'sell you more crap'.
Finally - Apple uses mostly fairly standard stuff. I have a Samsung that uses a far-flung USB kind of standard I've never seen elsewhere. Apple has actually been focusing on USB-C pretty well on their own.
In summary: these kinds of rulings fundamentally do not belong at the level of the legal draft - they belong in standards bodies. They will not solve the problems they are intended to solve, and will simply accrue more overhead for everyone in the EU. Solving issues of sustainability and recycling etc. should be one elsewhere and likely requires some bigger picture thinking.
I'm not sure why you assume that this law, should it eventually appear, would be enforced with jail time? For that matter, why it would even be targeted at sellers of cables instead of phone makers?
A significant portion - if not the vast majority - of laws and regulations have no criminal penalties and have civil penalties at most. Many are just advisory. Notice how Apple has technically been in violation of these rules for years and is only now getting punished and nobody is going to jail.
Everyone shouts about GDPR but fines are something like the 3rd or 4th stage of the remedy process - up until that point the regulator is working with you and no punishment of any kind has occurred. Of course since the GDPR is at an EU level, individual member states could opt to jail people for violations - I couldn't find any examples of that, however.
Although I'm more of an Android guy and and would certainly prefer the world to use just 1 standard, I am to admit the Lightning connector feels like the best I've ever seen. I would love if it could replace all the micro-USB and USB-C.
Because they're much more difficult to standardise. They would require each individual user to change all their plugs in their home, which is not even something the average person can do.
On the other hand, finding a different connector and cable when you eventually buy a new phone is seamless.
This is an instance where I oppose the idea in the abstract, but support it in the specifics: USB-C has finally achieved a degree of "good enough" (naming/labeling issues notwithstanding) to be the ideal universal connector.
But: imagine what we might have gotten stuck with if this law had been implemented 10-20 years ago.
While this resolution isn't actually a law, it does call for the commission to ensure standards get updated as technology develops, so I'm not seeing why we should imagine us being extra stuck with some old technology.
I think the fear is, the companies will be hindered from making those innovations if they have to go through a centralized approval process, particularly if that process is slow, bureaucratic, technologically illiterate, resistant to change, etc (to say nothing of regulatory capture).
I'm not deadset against this sort of thing, and I think we could do a lot worse than USB-C as the new universal connector (at least for the next decade or so), but given past attempts at regulating tech (cookie banners), I think it's a legitimate concern.
Well yes, but the upside of standards is that you are not beholden to a single company that could at any point try to create vendor lock-in and force you to pay an unfair price.
Lightning is actually worse in most ways. For instance, it doesn't have the bandwidth to transmit even 1080p video uncompressed (USB-C can do 4K - one reason they put USB-C on the iPad Pro).
The only debatable advantages to Lightning are in the physical form factor, but that's hard to quantify (you mostly hear anecdotes "my USB-C port is a bit loose after 6 months" which could just come down to manufacturing quality rather than the design of the port itself)
I guess Apple has sold one too many $3 cables for $29.95 in the iStore ...
I see companies like Motorola, LG, Kyocera, and Nintendo as more abusive. Sell a few tens of millions of devices ,(not 100M a year) and still, use a custom proprietary charging cable and transformer, soldered together in 1 piece so it hits the dumpster in 1-2Y when the cable frays!
Running with the argument that the EU wants the plug that plugs into the phone standardized... what about an Apple Watch that can make LTE calls? Would that be considered under this? Where would you force a company to add a port of any kind to a device that size?
I find it terribly amusing that e-waste is one of their arguments. Every Apple device I buy requires a new set of cables. I replace my hardware every the years... Almost as if creating waste wasn't really a problem for them as long as they were profiting.
Great, a phone charging semantic designed and mandated by a committee of EU bureaucrats. The jokes just write themselves here. Apple will no doubt bravely respond by removing the charging port completely. Wait until these folks hear about the Qi Standard!
I hope they will think this thoroughly. Because forcing Apple to use USB-C on all iPhones can generate significant waste in the early years of transition to USB-C.
As a side note: a unified charging port might also mean more usb-c wired headphones instead of disposable bluetooth earbuds. Another win for the environment.
The EU has tended to this kind of thing for a long time now, overriding its opinions of how things should be "standardised" over the top of liberty. Makes sense if you think about it: given its nature as an institution, its modus operandi is to "standardize" and "make uniform", as a core expression of its sovereignty over what is a highly heterogeneous territory.
Fortunately though, Apple will be around much longer than it will.
oh man, after countless examples of EU regulation gone haywire (cookies, gdpr, vat, link tax, copyright, bananas, diabetics, olive oil refills, epileptic lightbulbs etc etc) one would have thought that the EU bureaucrats would have finally taken a step back and pause a bit.
let's just hope Macron's push for an EU refresh come sooner rather than later. because it's not normal looking more towards the UK removing a bunch of these regulations than looking forward to yet another round of EU bureaucrats messing everything up.
My iPad and Mac are usb-c. My iPhone isn’t. We all know this and have to carry two cables or more. However, I already use a common charger as it’s only the charger End that needs to be considered. We could save on cables, however.
Still, the irony of Apple complaining about being forced to adopt a standard when they’ve been at the vanguard of aggressively dropping older ports is amusing.
> Still, the irony of Apple complaining about being forced to adopt a standard when they’ve been at the vanguard of aggressively dropping older ports is amusing.
Is it? Nearly every big industry player hates being regulated to make a decision they didn’t make.
If Apple are really bothered by this they should just make 2 versions (lightening and USB-C) and let consumers choose.
They already do multiple versions for radios (GSM vs CDMA) so I can’t imagine this would be a terrible challenge for them other than losing lightening cable licensing fees.
Wow, this is just yet another display of regulators complete ignorance of technology. They just don't learn. Regulation is about 10-20 years behind the current and their solution is to say: "You have to use this method of doing things"
Yeah right, and next year? What do we do next year? Will we just wait for regulators to approve a new way of doing things every 100 million years?
Pretty easy: just don't include charger in the box at all. Make Europeans pay for the idiocy of their politicians. Apple, BTW, makes the best power supplies in the industry, as confirmed by many teardowns.
If there's anything that needs to be standardized it's the port which is used to charge the device. That port, today, should be USB-C. But the law doesn't do that.
Why should the EU government impose restrictions on mobile charger types?
I'm no fan of Apple,and frankly, I find it gratifying that someone is pushing them around - something Apple routinely does to entities that aren't as powerful, but regulating chargers in the name of __insert_populist_reason__ is just way too authoritarian by the EU. Please go solve real problems
Electronic waste created because you can't use the charger from $vendor_x with a mobile device from $vendor_y -- and subsequently have no use for the charger -- is a Real Problem.
This is a step toward solving that, and thus, they are solving real problems.
What about mandating Qi wireless charging as well? Think of it as mandating Bluetooth; you don’t care about the hardware, just meeting the wireless interface spec.
If I could ubiquitously charge my mobile devices anywhere with gear built into my surroundings, I’d likely never need future charging cables or hardware.
You lose some electrical efficiency but gain a reduction in physical hardware churn.
Mandating wireless charging is still a bit of a stretch (it's not popular yet, so would be a short-term cost and manufacturing increase), but wireless charging is mentioned in the linked article as something they should look into ensuring is broadly-compatible (which should help prevent incompatibility waste when it does become ubiquitous).
Also, presently anyway, wireless charging generally has power limits on the order of 5 watts, while the USB 3 PD spec allows for up to 100. A modern mobile phone pulls more than 5 watts from a wall charger, so mandating wireless charging would also result in a short-term charging time increase. They're also not as easy to transport and use anywhere (e.g. on a train with a power socket but without a tray table). Many people would find that unacceptable.
My Nexus 5 had wireless charging, I had that phone for more than 3 years, and I never got to use it before it died and I upgraded to a 6P, which doesn't have it.
I’m on an iPhone 11 Pro Max with Qi chargers in my vehicles, on my night stand, and at my desk and use wireless charging almost exclusively. Likely where my bias originates for assuming wireless charging would see broad use.
I would like to see clean solutions in coffee shops and on trains for Qi charging to enable the most common use cases of course.
Is compatibility and reducing the amount of electric junk that needs to be produced, and that we need to carry around really "__insert_populist_reason__" to you?
Standardizing (controlling) by fiat tech they didn't make, with no real need or justification. Just for the sake of the flex, being busybodies, and pretending they're important and "the boss of you".
Sooner that rabble gets overthrown the better. One domino has fallen now, hope the rest follow in short order.
Or maybe the need and justification is that multiple similar but incompatible charging standards is wasteful and annoying. As that's the stated reason, it seems a bit more likely than "for the sake of flex".
Is government regulation of non-goverment tech illegitimate? That would be most all regulation then.
I believe it’s too late. In my opinion the current political climate has fueled outrage culture and from my perspective things have gone from bad to worse.
iPhone’s not using USB-C is kind of a pain and I’m still not sure I love government intervention in this area. Lightning is weird in that it works quite well but as everything else has moved to USB-C it’s become more of a weird outlier. Definitely a mixed bag overall.
Its sad how almost all of HN blindly points to apple and states they are the bad guys. With the number of devices out there, its totally more natural that the standard will be lightning instead of micro-usb ir usb-c.
I can't see a single reason why iPhone shouldn't use usb-c at the moment except to build Apple's own walled garden to charge a surplus against its customer.
The iPhone doesn't use USB-C at the moment in no small part because a large segment of Apple's customers would throw an incredible fit if they were asked to switch connectors "again," this "soon" after the switch from the original 30-pin connector to the Lightning. There were customers pissy about that for years and years. And there are still people real salty about them moving their laptops to USB-C charging rather than keeping the proprietary MagSafe. (There are, of course, also people salty about them getting rid of all other ports on laptops, which is more defensible, although it's still mildly ironic that the first laptops Apple shipped in the company's entire history that have zero proprietary connectors on them have made people so unhappy with the connectors.)
Standardization and open standards are big deals to the kind of person who reads Hacker News, but I can absolutely guarantee you that if/when the iPhone actually moves to USB-C, we will be flooded with hot takes about how that shift is just another money-grubbing move by Greedy Evil Apple to make us all have to buy new cables and/or dongles.
Apple was quite willing to drop the 3.5mm audio port despite having plenty of customers with headphones that plugged into it - they simply included an adapter with new phones. Why should it be any different here?
Because lightning was available long before USB-C and there's no reason that hundreds of millions of customers should have to switch to new cables and throw billions of old chargers, wires, and accessories into landfills?
When USB-C is superior for using on phones, then I'm OK with it. But right now it's just exchanging one plug for another because a bunch of bureaucrats say so.
Does this mean in 20 years we'll still be stuck with USB-C instead of something better because just Brussels says so?
Well right now, if you are not fully locked into the Apple ecosystem, you require two cables. That's quite a waste, no?
We're quite lucky no PC manufacturer managed to get as big as Apple is today back in the 80s-90s. There's no way we would have universal RAM, universal Keyboards, universal Video Cards, etc, etc, today, if that was the case.
Standardization is a fantastic reason. Hundreds of millions of people have to switch to new cables, chargers, adapters, and devices every once in a while anyway, and if that never happened, these products would not have advanced. Progress is good. You may argue the environmental point, but there's no reason to connect that with this transition and not the many others.
The resolution doesn't require any specific connector and the implementation would be from a European Commission directive that could be updated as technology evolves.
When you have had a process fail because you have used the wrong usb-c cable, wrong USB-c port or wrong USB-c dongle it is really frustrating. The crazy stuff that goes on in USB-c land is a complete PITA.
1. Existing iPhone users already have a bunch of Lightning cables (I probably have a dozen) but would have to buy a bunch of USB-C cables. That would be annoying, expensive, and wasteful.
2. Lightning is not a standard like USB-C, but is (subjectively) much nicer, as others in this thread have pointed out.
> With USB-C there's no real reason to have other standards for charging a cell phone.
I'll take lightning over usb-c anyday. I currently have a pixel 3 and it does not connect half the time and yes, I clean out the stupid port with a toothpick even though I never had to do that with an iphone.
Android auto is especially annoying as a slight bump can cause it to disconnect and then it takes like 20 seconds to get it back running with the map on the dashboard.
The stupid headphone jack connector also sucks because the only way I can work out with it is if I use 2 rubber bands to pull the usb-c to headphone jack connector tight constantly or else the slightest movement in my pocket will disconnect it.
Reasons to have other standards exist because they are better than USB-C. I’ve got a lightning port on my current phone, while my old phone was USB-C, as well as my current laptop and tablet both USB-C. I have to say, the lightning feels significantly more secure.
Also, we have a standard for wireless charging. Qi has been around for years. Old Nexus used to have it. New iPhones do have it. IKEA even sells cheap furniture with chargers built in.
APPLAUSE. awesome. Apple is monopolistic and is guilty of deliberate obsolescence of even proprietary standards they helped push, like Firewire.
I, for one, and completely tired of them pretending that there is any basis other than greed and the desire to control others. There is certainly a demonstrable lack of technical motivations for the vast majority of their choices, and a standard would presumably take any such concerns into account anyway.
Yet the Apple statement, and most of the articles about this (including the linked one), are talking about the phone's connector and talks about lightning and usb-c. Most of the comments online are talking about how this forces Apple to use usb-c.
So, which is it? Isn't this just regulating the power bricks / back half of the charging equation? I don't see anything in the joint motion or directive stating a connector on a device has to be uniform at all.
Joint motion: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
Directive: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...