It took a decade, but the EU has finally achieved what no other major union of countries has done: mandating a single universal connector. As the world's largest single consumer market (500 million people), this decision sets a global standard, with the rest of the world following suit.
The delay was largely due to intense lobbying from manufacturers, especially Apple, which profited significantly from licensing their proprietary Lightning port.
Next up on the EU's list for 2026: Easily Changeable Batteries (you know, what every cell phone 20 years ago had before Apple).
I’m happy to have batteries glued to my smartphone (replaceable, but only in the sense the main logic board is replaceable) if it saves even a few % in weight, rigidity or how waterproof it is. The times when phones had battery hatches were the dark ages. I used 2-3 batteries in every smartphone I used and the replacement was always cheap ($50 or so). That’s enough. Adding the possibility to user-replace it for half that by adding some design compromise like a hatch wouldn’t be interesting to consumers. For every battery replaced, how many screens are replaced? 3? Yet no one seems to be talking about making it easier for end users to replace screens?
Waterproofing being a problem was always a myth. The Samsung Galaxy S5 was IP67 certified and had a removable battery.
I think this removability is part of a broader push for the EU to become a circular economy - at the end of life of the phone the user would discard the device and battery into separate bins.
That is at least the official goal regarding EV batteries and there are efforts underway to make it happen.
It still compromises something I’m sure. Weight/thickness/rigidity or something else. The phone already has a hatch for the battery: the shell. If it takes 1 hour to replace a battery or 30 seconds feels like it doesn’t matter since you need to replace the battery every 5 years and in that time you are likely to take it apart for screen repair anyway.
Perhaps my lack of understanding comes from using more expensive phones? I use iPhones and keep them for 5 years and usually replace 1-2 screens in that time. And since the phone is $1k new it feels completely irrelevant if a battery replacement costs $50 to have it done at a shop or $25 do do myself. If I used a $200 phone there could be a difference of course.
Of course it’s a design drawback. Otherwise it would be the design.
The drawback could be as simple as “higher cost to manufacture” or “higher risk of consumers using incorrect/third party batteries”. I’d argue the latter is a real problem, but everyone might not agree.
As for parent comment it was about an android phone. I never used or owned one so can’t comment.
My main point was that the batteries are replaced anyway, if the product still has life in it (os updates, decent perf) because people have shops replace batteries or they trade them in when upgrading and they are refurbished and resold. But all of this hinges on the product being a high cost/long support product to begin with, like iPhone. Cheaper androids don’t fit this description.
> The drawback could be as simple as “higher cost to manufacture” or “higher risk of consumers using incorrect/third party batteries”
This wouldn’t be an issue if we had some kind of standards around batteries for cellphones rather than making unique batteries for every single model.
If you could just buy a “Type B” format phone battery for a phone this would eliminate the issue. It would be similar to the charger market, where different manufacturers could compete. This is _toward_ the market economics that capitalists so love, unless they’re benefiting from market capture of proprietary parts.
One-off designs are wasteful and drive up costs and drive down quality.
I’m under the impression (probably created by Apple) that anything not tailor made by them is worse. I can charge my phone with any 5V source and the right connector but it’s always slower than an Apple charger. Why, I don’t know. Could be that the phone just recognizes the Apple charger and refuses to charge full speed otherwise. But is there anything that could be done about that? It’s malicious compliance at worst or just a lowest common denominator standard at best.
I use third party batteries and the phone refuses to reliably gauge their health (understandable) which makes them objectively worse. The list goes on. It’s bad for the wallet and the environment but people still want to pay for complete tailor made ecosystems and I’m not optimistic that it can change completely via regulation. USB-C standardization lets me charge with a third party charger in a pinch but it still doesn’t rid me of Apple’s monopoly on good iPhone chargers!
Adding another datapoint: My iPhone 11 is 3 years old (from Apple Center brand new) and battery is already at 73%, prompting me to replace it.
Phone costed me 600€, replacement after recent Apple price hike costs another 100€. I’m already considering just buying another iPhone next year since replacement costs so much.
Since my first Nokia 5110 I’ve replaced 0 screens, 2-3 screen protectors, 1 keypad, and so many batteries. Ofc this is all anecdotal, for me batteries, lack of updates and non-extendable storage have been the main reasons killing otherwise perfectly useable iPhones.
The real next step is standardizing battery sizes. Think of all the other gadgets that have replaceable batteries. (Eg. Power tools)
Most of those batteries are standard at the wholesale level. But a thin plastic layer added to house the battery makes it proprietary due to the connection interface. And now it’s a world of incompatible batteries and price gouging for replacement batteries.
> The real next step is standardizing battery sizes. Think of all the other gadgets that have replaceable batteries. (Eg. Power tools)
I don't think we are at that point yet. There is still a lot of innovation happening in batteries on the cell and pack level. Cell sizes are mostly standardized indeed, but packs not. For high performance and reliability, you might want to glue those cells in-place. Or some manufacturer may decide to use a more capable battery management system, which then requires more space. I think that enforcing standardization would be a major hindrance for innovation.
> price gouging
Can we stop using this term? It's a meaningless word used by politicians to scapegoat businesses. If they really wanted to solve problems, they would go after monopolies or cartels. Both hinder competition and thus make it less likely that the consumer gets a good deal. "Price gouging" on the other hand is about whether a price is "fair" or not. Unlike monopolies or cartels, there is no clear definition for "fairness". I can call something fair while you would call it unfair. You cannot solve people being unfair to other people, but you can solve a lack of competition. So that's where the aim should be.
Right, and unless there is some significant barrier to entry, whether a natural moat created by past performance by the company, or an unnatural moat created by some kind of corruption, price gouging alone makes it easier for competitors to enter the market since there is some slop available in the market rate for whatever good it is.
I guess the real next step is to keep selling thick old devices as the EU SKU and modern innovative stuff to the rest of the world. Apple already has to do that on the software side for their AI features. Given the current GDP/capita trajectory of the EU, that is likely all they will be able to afford anyway. :)
Standardisation can lead to innovation or be an innovation in itself. Think about containers - shipping containers or docker containers - the most exciting innovation in phones is not in the form of the chargers or batteries.
Sure. Standardization led to USB-C which is great. Mandate led to nothing and is bad and unnecessary.
Arguably achieved nothing as Android was already on USB-C and Apple too on everything but iPhone and would have switched anyway soon for speed reasons regardless. Arguably, the switch was too early and a disservice to iPhone users.
apple would _not_ switch for speed reasons, they are interested in you syncing files though their cloud. Similar to google and android, you "can" sync/backup with a cable, but usability is a nightmare.
Speed is not just useful for syncing files to a computer, which is not the primary use case of iPhone USB-C. The computer is no longer the center of your digital world. The iPhone is (and the cloud). Most iPhone users don't even have a Mac. The use case is to connect the iPhone to other accessories like displays, fetch photos from cameras, etc.
That said, I stand by my comment that most iPhone users would have been better off with Lightning. For many of us who carry Macs as well as phones, having a singular charger is beneficial (less so now that you'd wanna use MagSafe with the Mac, again), but still years of Lightning cables make them easy to find in any iPhone household.
They had already switched iPad Pros long before EU mandate was a thing, so I don't think your would've-not-been theory is substantiated by evidence. If I were to speculate, Apple's evolution would be towards killing the port altogether and do everything wirelessly which is an admirable goal (I'm sure will be downvoted to the oblivion in this community for saying this, but that's also the sentiment of the initial MacBook Air release in 2008 which now defines the modern laptop).
For sending files, Apple has perfected wireless AirDrop and that's quite speedy.
Except your analogy does not hold because you can simply choose not to buy the product with the connector you don't like or can no longer afford as a result of socialism.
It appears much harder to opt out of said socialism without leaving the country though, so read that again with this pretext perhaps?
50 is not cheap. There are a lot of phones not worth a $50 repair. They work just fine if it wasn't that they need to be charged often. Disposal is also a problem. They have their own bin here.
You are thinking of the new price. I mean second hand value. In mint condition a phone from a few years ago is almost worthless. If it has scratches, a small crack or a dirty charge port it isn't worth anything anymore. You can buy the same model without the defects (and a reasonable battery) for less than the battery swap costs.
Old phones are refurbed and sold. New screen and battery and it’s often as good as new. A 5 year old iPhone 11 with a new battery and screen is great value at maybe $200. It’s important that the battery replacement done at those shops is easy enough otherwise the used phones become waste rather than refurbished. But whether my mom can replace the battery I don’t feel is very important.
A very clumsy person can replace the battery of a flashlight or a radio with greater success rate than a repair shop disassembling a phone and looking into your personal information while you are stranded by the side of the road unaware of the forest fire and the alien invasion while you struggle with HN withdrawal symptoms.
If we assume a batter needs replacement, that is likely to be years after a new phone. A years old used phone with an old battery will usually have a bad battery too, though. It is more about whether older hardware is worth it to invest with a new battery in the first place.
FWIW it took me 15 minutes to replace the screen on my Pixel, took some basic tools but it's a reasonable tradeoff for waterproofing. The battery seemed like an easy swap as well, though I didn't need to at the time. Smartphone repair kits should be sold right along the phones.
It makes it sound like you don’t care what the downside exactly is, which in turn makes you sound very proselytic and not interested in any discussion.
Yes replaceable batteries make your phone thicker, ok. The upside outweighs this downside by a far margin for me.
The reason it does not exist is definitely not because people do not want it, it’s because it ensures a higher revenue to smartphone constructors, it is basic capitalism (and I don’t mean capitalism is bad, it just will always tend to maximise profit, it’s its nature)
Finally, it is less wasteful to be able to replace components.
And to add an anecdote: replacing my battery on my iPhone was so complicated that the apple technician broke the screen (it was replaced free of charge) and it cost me 50% of the residual value of my phone. Wasteful and expensive, in summary. Replaceable batteries would solve this.
Apple profited from their phones, nothing was close to as good as lightning when it came out. They showed the world how nice it would be with a simple reversible charger.
Thankfully usb c is standardized but it wouldn’t have happened nearly as quickly without Apple.
How is Europe the largest single consumer market at 500 million people? Are you unaware of China, and also India? What am I missing? Even if you measure in economic size and not population, you’re still wrong.
I’m also curious, how and when will it be decided that it’s eventually time to move onto a new/better standard? If the law came into force 20 years ago, would we still be stuck with the standard of that time? Who decides when a new standard is worth upgrading?
I think part of the delay is just that USB-C didn't really take off for cheap devices until like 2018.
Before that there was no connector that was suitable for a universal charger, we barely even knew if dynamic voltage negotiation was going to be safe or not(I remember thinking it was going to try devices with bugs).
MicroUSB was craptastic, barrel jacks aren't voltage standardized in practice, but pretty much every average consumer adores USB-C. It's like a shining example of what tech can be.
If you made a law requiring any other connector, people would probably be angry. We could probably learn to live with a barrel jack, but most likely wrong voltage connection accidents would have happened at least occasionally.
Every battery is changeable.
The fact that you can't replace them without a screwdriver and a heat gun doesn't make them irreplaceable.
You're also unlikely to fix the TV, but you have no questions about it.
This is stating the obvious without addressing the point. It is implicit that we are discussing user replaceable batteries. Your average user does not own a heat gun or the knowledge of how to use it to replace their own battery. Removing the requirement for the majority of users to have to take their phone to a technician to do the replacement will undoubtedly result in less eWaste. To the best of my knowledge, my TV does not contain a consumable battery which is core to its primary function. Sure the display panel and other components may have a finite lifetime but these are long enough to not be considered consumables by either consumers or manufacturers like batteries are.
I have replaced more screens on my phone than batteries.
I don’t feel like focusing on fixing things at home is the best way to ensure device longevity.
Creating a demand for technicians that can replace all kinds of things on our phones makes it so there’s always some phone repair shop nearby. Every mall I frequent has one. This creates a lower threshold for keeping the phone alive no matter what goes wrong with it.
The battery on my last phone outlasted the phones useful lifespan, so it’s not like batteries on modern phones is a part that’s particularly likely to need replacement. Every user is different of course, some go through a lot more charge cycles. But then there’s others that often break their screens. Or their charge port. If all these things should be easily user replaceable without tools, the phone would become very bulky.
I feel like we’re pretty close to a good compromise, now that Apple has a program to do these kind of replacement at home if you want. It’s really not that difficult.
User-replaceable batteries will require additional space on your phone's body.
I'm not willing to trade convenience for a rare battery replacement case.
If you want - you can buy modular phones, pay for that, don't force other people
And I'll go and pay a couple dozen bucks for this work, like all normal people. But eco-activists are starting to say that eWaste is caused by non-replaceable batteries, not by the obsolescence of devices. No one will change the battery in an outdated device, even if it is replaceable.
eWaste is caused by all kinds of things and one thing that is easily solvable is replaceable batteries. I also hope that it will be forced for all phones, people shouldn't be able to pay a little extra to destroy the planet
I remember well the time of replaceable batteries, they were changed much more often than they should have been. More batteries are changed - more lithium waste.
And I also remember very well how when the phone fell, these batteries flew out and were damaged, and I also remember well how these batteries burn from mechanical damage and they cannot be extinguished, because it is a chemical reaction.
There are pros and cons everywhere, so far I see more cons.
A battery is a 'consumable component'. The closest thing to a consumable component in a TV is capacitors, which can live as long as two or three decades.
Those changeable batteries were horribly unreliable! I've had over a dozen different brand of phones and eventually they all started to black out occasionally when the connections got corroded or otherwise loosened up. I really hope soldered batteries stay an option or I will be buying my phone outside the EU.
Outside the EU, in many cases, device batteries will also be user-swappable.
Companies like Apple greatly prefer (well, when they're not petulantly trying to show the EU who's boss) to ship one design to the whole world. It's a nuisance to have separate design processes, manufacturing processes, marketing materials, etc.
This is why, once it became affordable, the entire industry started making auto-switching power supplies.
Unless hardware manufacturers finagle a way to continue selling soldered batteries in the EU, user-swappable batteries will become the norm again.
> profited significantly from licensing their proprietary Lightning port.
How significant? Doubtful it moves the needle for Apple.
People often forget Lightning is much superior to microUSB which was the alternative at the time (also mechanically superior to USB-C), and that Apple was instrumental in widespread USB-C adoption by taking a heat for the longest time on their butterfly MacBooks.
And yes, while I am happy with USB-C today, I totally believe mandating it does stifle innovation. Imagine if we mandated microUSB in 2010.
Mechanically broken? I have never seen a Lightning break or get too loose in years. I’ve used both connectors extensively. USB-C I’ve faced loose female connectors, broken female connector to the degree that it heated up the MacBook because it generated interrupts for kernel to handle. On the male side I’ve seen bent cables and of course even without mechanical failure there are cables that should work and just don’t for different use cases (Charge but no data. Data but no alt mode video.)
We should look at data but USB-C anecdotally have been an order of magnitude worse for me and people around me.
I had to change a lightning cable once, after years of daily use, and it wasn't the connector the issue. I wonder what was the people owing the cable you saw did with them...
Are you referring to Apple Thunderbolt cables? They are active cables with circuits in them. Otherwise, I am not sure which cable you are referring to that sells for that much.
I understand as a consumer you get emotional and pissed, but even if true, that is a drop in the bucket and not "significant" profit for Apple.
The true value of MFi licensing to Apple would be influencing the accessory market, not peanuts in dongle sales.
If you think it is the same, then you are free not to purchase the cable from Apple. Either way to claim that such cable constitutes "significant" revenue to Apple Inc. is just hyperbolic/preposterous.
You're taking things literally, but the point is that everything is overpriced with apple and they're getting away with it because of the cult following they've cultured and are now milking. In my previous comment, I simply picked one of the ridiculous things cult followers pay for.
They're going to keep milking their followers no matter how ridiculous each point seems when someone puts it in writing. That's how "the needle moves".
Maybe you could consider Apple cables to be overengineered, but I can readily understand why a cable built this way - irrespective of manufacturer - is not overpriced. And it's not just about a chip.
The cable is simply factually better on every metric than the hand-soldered 4 wire el cheapo one at 15~16 min. There is no cult in that.
Now if one only needs to carry USB 2.0 speeds or a limited amount of power it'd be ridiculous to buy a 100+ or even 50+ cable. That doesn't make the cable overpriced either, merely overspecced for that use case.
So you're suggesting because everything is overpriced with Apple and they are a cult leader (your opinion) the government should step in and dictate the price and behavior?
Last time I checked some European countries have not only tax-free churches, they also facilitate collecting taxes and funding them.
Instead of policing cults and dictating pricing, I suggest simply not purchasing what you don't like.
(While we are on the subject of forcing behavior changes, let's mandate air conditioning and a singular electrical wall outlet. Why not?)
* The connection interface was superior to USB-A Micro/Mini in both size and reliability - and this was the contemporary connector in 2012.
* They had undergone a physical connector change only once, and it was not received well by vendors.
* USB-C was not anywhere near ready for the iPhone 5, and the 40 pin would not do well in that type of device.
* USB-C and Lightening are comparable on size and reliability (saying nothing about speed) - so even after USB- started gaining adoption there was not a strong incentive to switch over. It wasn't superior.
* USB-C charging only would be fine, but people would expect drivers for storage, HDMI, radio docks etc. Easy to undersell this effort in hindsight.
I also doubt that it was a profit motive.
let’s not forget that Apple themselves helped design USB-C and pushed for it to be the standard. I guess they couldn't wait for it to be ready, and given the iPhone 5 came out in 2012 and the first commercially successful USB-C devices came in 2016 I guess they were right.
Precisely. The irony is that almost all non-MacBook computer still come with at least one USB-A port to this day. If it weren't for Apple pushing USB-C only on the MacBook, that connector's universal adoption as the primary data/video interface wouldn't have been as widespread. They legitimized the connector by forcing it on MacBook users.
One of the most profitable companies in the world trying to build more of a moat of incompatibilities with the rest of the non-apple world with no profit or ulterior motive? /s
Once a for-profit company gets large enough doing anything other than “maximize profit up to the point of illegality” becomes a Herculean task. It’s a natural consequence of capitalism, greed, and large organizations.
> People often forget Lightning is much superior to microUSB which was the alternative at the time
At the time, yes. But not for years now. Apple could've changed the path by opening this as a standard but choose not to.
> Imagine if we mandated microUSB in 2010.
Apple would include an extra/expanded connector like a number of other device producers. Then they'd talk to the other large companies about moving to a new standard just like the currently introduced law proposes. This is not a "you must use usb-c" law, but rather "you must figure out how to get along" law.
Also, this pretty much happened, just without regulation. EU at the time effectively said "figure it out, or else" and microUSB became a standard for years. Now they felt like they need to push harder.
> This is not a "you must use usb-c" law, but rather "you must figure out how to get along" law.
No, this is exactly "you must use USB-C law." Please don't reframe it as a strawman.
> Apple would include an extra/expanded connector like a number of other device producers.
They did mandate such thing IIRC, just not forced directly on device, which is a slightly better IMO, to mandate how something is sold rather than dictating how the device should be built.
It's usb-c currently with an explicit: if there's a consensus, it can be changed. See point 9 of https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%... I mean, the point of the regulation is not usb-c. It's literally called a harmonisation directive, with a currently chosen implementation.
That literally means you have to change the law first, then innovate.
If you read it any other way, you'd be naive.
Good luck getting to "consensus" with the low end Android manufacturers who do not give a flying fuck about the customer experience and want to save $0.02. It just won't happen before they are forced to do it by the market competition, which won't happen now.
It has already happened. This is a change to usb-c from the previously enforced micro-USB which was also done by the EU. So it can be done again.
> Good luck getting to "consensus" with the low end Android manufacturers
Are they going to be more influential than Apple? Because this change happened even with Apple opposing it. And I really don't believe others have a stronger voice in Europe.
MicroUSB was not mandated on the device. The adapter shipped in the box satisfied the requirements. If it weren't for competition from Lightning (2 sided connector) I'm not sure the switch to USB-C would have happened either so no that wasn't a legal transition of the same sort.
Apple is a minority manufacturer in the EU especially now that UK is not part of the EU. Plus EU politicians measure their manhood by sticking it to US companies so they love hating on Apple and Google and favoring China and South Korea.
> This is not a "you must use usb-c" law, but rather "you must figure out how to get along" law.
Correct, thanks for reading the actual regulation
It does specify USB-C as the common charger port for now, of course (with support for future charging protocols over USB-C). And it does allow for technological evolution
(And of course the margin of improvements in wired charging diminishes over time - I think such regulation would have been more problematic before USB-C came along)
So only major corporations that can afford go lobby EU bureaucrats should have any say? Any small/medium company that wants to introduce any better/improved standard will just be ignored.
It's not for our benefit. They had a better connector and decided to keep it proprietary. If they made it an open standard, there's a chance the regulation would be enforcing lightning for everyone. They don't get to both keep it proprietary and complain about being forced to sell standard things.
This is a step in the right direction but still doesn't address my biggest concern with e-waste - the battery.
Because almost none of the electronics you buy come with a replaceable battery, the second you buy something and use it on a regular basis it's destined to die and be thrown out within the next 4-8ish years due to the battery degrading and becoming increasingly more dangerous to keep around. Something that might be in perfect working condition and could be used for another 10 years has to be thrown out because of one single component.
I understand that batteries come in all shapes, sizes, capacities, yada yada, but imagine if we had standard rechargeable batteries like we have standard non-rechargeable batteries and things were built in a way where you could easily replace batteries like we could on phones a decade ago. You would double or triple the lifespan of a ton of things.
The thing that really annoys me is that batteries in most phones are indeed replaceable, but so many people just trash their phone when the battery life gets bad. Sure, many/most of these phones don't have a user replaceable battery, but even for high-end phones you can get the battery replaced for under $100 (and that's on the high end; for many you can get it done for half that).
I don't know if this is an education problem or what. Maybe manufacturers make it less obvious that you can get batteries replaced, because doing so would hurt sales of new phones. I dunno.
Sure, in an ideal world standardized batteries would be available off the shelf, and regular people could replace theirs with standard or even no tools. But honestly, I don't think the world we live in is that terrible when it comes to this.
And if batteries were trivially replaceable, I'm sure they'd come up with a different excuse: not enough storage space, "it's getting slow", this year's model has a much nicer camera, blah blah blah blah.
It's not that I'm not sympathetic toward wanting the new shiny. I've been there and done that and generated my share of e-waste. But I've managed to (mostly!) get off that treadmill. I only got a new phone last year because my old one stopped getting security updates. The new one will (in theory) be supported for 7 years, so, barring loss or catastrophic breakage, I should be good until 2031.
I think this is changing simply because the rate of change for phones has slowed down like it did for computers. Just like a 2014 computer is a lot closer to a 2024 computer than a 2004 computer was to a 2014 computer in 2014, a five-year-old phone is a lot less outdated than five years ago.
After happily replacing the battery in a ten year old phone, six months later it was obsolete due to the 3G network switch off; the device was no longer capable of one of it's primary functions; making and receiving phone calls.
I could have had someone replace the battery in my Moto G%+ a couple of years ago. But it would have cost at least 800 NOK (about 80 USD). Instead I bought a Moto G30 for 1 200 NOK (about 120 USD) which has a better camera, faster processor, and more storage space.
Mobile phones haven't yet reached the point of diminishing returns on power, cameras, etc., so it doesn't yet make economical sense for an individual to keep the old devices working. I have kept the Moto G5+ and I use it as an internet radio and to listen to podcasts so it isn't a complete waste. Unfortunately the battery is now in such a poor state that I have to keep it on a timer to cut off charging frequently to avoid overheating.
Android could of course make batteries last longer by giving the user control over the charging regime.
I am going to say something that I haven't found anywhere but it has been my experience with every single battery replacement I ir somewhat close had.
The new battery, even if it's Samsung original, it isn't as good as new, it is better than the old one, but not anywhere close as first day phone.
Why? No idea. I imagine that although the battery is new it was built circa when the model was in production and somehow that has affected its capacity.
So you get a phone, you pay 60/80 euros, and you get maybe, two hours more of battery when a new phone would give you 6 or 7.
For a 4-5 year phone "under $100" still might be more than the phone is worth.
And then there is the other problem that an old enough phone is no longer getting software updates, including security updates either.
Yes, it is still probably less than buying a new phone but you don't know how long it will be before another component dies. If replacing the battery gives you another 4-5 years it might be worth it, but if something else is going to break in a couple months, probably not.
>Then we could begin forcing manufacturers to sell security updates regardless of the age of the device.
Who's going to pay for those updates? It's hard for the economics to work out. It makes sense for handset makers to pour engineering resources into developing and maintaining operating systems when there's millions of customers. How are you going to scrape together enough money when there's only a handful of customers?
I thought you had a point but then I remembered how funny it is. If you are dealing with sensitive customer data you shouldn't get to skip security.
It is actually cheap and easy if we change the question: Should you be allowed to run a closed source proprietary platform with insufficient security? After all, if you open it up and let people do what they want it becomes their responsibility.
Bricking the device at a predetermined date isn't very elegant but it would work. Maybe the user should have the option to return it (working or not) and get some money back.
It doesn't have to be that expensive to continue supporting old devices. If all your devices use the same software, and new versions don't add new hardware requirements it wouldn't be that hard to continue supporting old hardware.
But in the current ecosystem every device has its own medley of custom firmware and software that gets abandoned when the maker stops selling that version, and the makers are incentivized to stop updates to drive customers to buy new devices.
I think this is indeed a problem of awareness - and I'm sure you're right that companies wouldn't go out of their way to let users know they can do so - but also one of trustworthiness: I think a lot of people don't trust third-party repair shops because they feel it's sketchy or unsafe in some way. If phone manufacturers were like, "Here's a list of our trusted third-party repair shops and the parts they can fix" I imagine a lot more people would get their stuff repaired.
Yeah, that's surely part of that. There are authorized service centers in major cities, but that's not very accessible for a lot of people. When I got my battery replaced, it meant 2 trips to a 100 km distant city (no same day replacement) which also meant a day without my phone. I could have opted for an unauthorized repair shop, but again there's the problem with trust, these often seem quite sketchy.
Apple have already been taking steps to comply with this, with new “electrically-induced adhesive debonding” glue used to secure the iPhone 16 battery, instead of the problematic "stretch to remove" adhesive strips.
Apparantely this makes it significantly easier to change the battery compared to previous models:
Standardized and widely available batteries would also be a huge step forward. Like the old nokia phone batteries that you could pick up anywhere.
Recently I started buying gadgets that have 18650 batteries, seems about the only standard around, but trying to buy the batteries has been a challenge. I even tried a couple European Amzn stores, but they only seem to have third party suppliers. It put me off from buying the MNT Reform even though I love the concept.
And the 18650 USB torch I bought has some stupid propriety magnetic connector on one end, so I'd say any such legislation should include both ends of these charger cables.
> trying to buy the batteries has been a challenge
Huh? I had no trouble getting 18650 batteries in the EU. They're everywhere, both protected and unprotected cells; lots of brands to choose from, including cheap unbranded ones. You can even get ones with built-in USB-C socket for charging.
That’s not very clear. How easy is ”readily”? I replaced a few and found the biggest obstacle being the glue they use to keep them in place inside (they must sit in compartments larger than the battery since it changes size). But would it be enough to not have glue and instead Velcro there? Would still require plugging and unplugging tiny cables and screwing out 20 tiny screws. Or does ”readily” mean ”hatch”? Not so sure people want hatches…
Huh, I've heard about this for a while but for some reason thought it was strictly regarding phones, maybe because they've been making the biggest headlines about it. Looking forward to it then.
I'm going to assume something got lost in this game of telephone because this otherwise sounds like an oxymoron: Of course a "portable" battery would be removable and replacable.
The battery in my phone is portable (I carry it around) but not removable without specialized tools.
It's REGULATION (EU) 2023/1542 if you want to read it.
> ‘portable battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 5 kg or less, is not designed specifically for industrial use and is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery
> [...]
> A portable battery shall be considered readily removable by the end-user where it can be removed from a product with the use of commercially available tools, without requiring the use of specialised tools, unless provided free of charge with the product, proprietary tools, thermal energy, or solvents to disassemble the product.
I think I see where I got tripped up. Essentially, they're saying all batteries in portable electronics will be portable by 2027 and defined as so-and-so; not that batteries today are portable and will be made compliant as defined so-and-so.
Because I think we can all agree: The battery on an ICOM walkie-talkie is portable, the battery in an Apple iPhone is not portable.
The definition of "portable" that's germane here is the statutory one that was quoted above:
> portable battery’ means a battery that is sealed, weighs 5 kg or less, is not designed specifically for industrial use and is neither an electric vehicle battery, an LMT battery, nor an SLI battery;
> ‘portable battery of general use’ means a portable battery, whether or not rechargeable, that is specifically designed to be interoperable and that has one of the following common formats 4,5 Volts (3R12), button cell, D, C, AA, AAA, AAAA, A23, 9 Volts (PP3);
When words are defined statutorily, that supersedes any "common sense" use of the word with respect to the sections governed by that statute.
It further goes on to state:
> Any natural or legal person that places on the market products incorporating portable batteries shall ensure that those products are accompanied with instructions and safety information on the use, removal and replacement of the batteries. Those instructions and that safety information shall be made available permanently online, on a publicly available website, in an easily understandable way for end-users.
So the goal is for all portable batteries to be removeable. However there's an exemption ("derogation") for devices intended to be used around water or washable. Most high end phones these days are to some extent submersible, which raises the question of whether this will exempt them from the user-replaceable requirement.
No, we cannot all agree. I think your definition of "portable" is not compatible with most people's. You seem to be conflating portable and removable; those are two different properties that do not have to coexist. If the battery in your iPhone was not portable, you would not be able to move your iPhone.
Given no further context, when I hear "portable battery" I think of a battery that is portable in itself. An iPhone is portable, but the battery embedded in it isn't. Contrast the battery pack that something like an ICOM walkie talkie would have, which is portable in itself.
Other ways to see it: An Electron program is portable, a .exe program is not portable; they are both programs. A stick of RAM is portable, soldered RAM on a motherboard or in a CPU is not portable; they are both RAM.
The comment I replied to mentioned "portable batteries" will be required to be "removable/replaceable", which sounds like an oxymoron because the entire point of a portable battery is that it's removable/replaceable.
The proper understanding was that electronics ("appliances") will become required to have portable batteries, because most batteries in them today are not portable.
If I'm still not coming across, let me put it this way: "Portable" in "portable iPhone" is a modifier on "iPhone", it is irrelevant with regards to the iPhone's battery which as of today is decidedly not portable anyway.
If I'm still not coming across: An iPhone being portable does not mean its battery is also portable.
You're coming across just fine. The problem is that you made a sweeping generalization that "I think we can all agree" when it is obvious that we cannot. Your definition does not make sense to me, just as mine does not make sense to you. Neither one matters anyway now that there is a legal definition that must be adhered to.
Removable batteries are a trade-off. They improve repairability and device longevity, but they increase manufacturing costs, reduce the effectiveness of waterproofing, and increase customer support issues. Battery contacts can degrade or become loose, causing phones to power off unexpectedly when handled roughly. Customers buy cheap 3rd party batteries and then complain to the phone manufacturer when battery life is poor. In some cases, 3rd party batteries malfunction and damage the phone (or even cause injury), and the customer blames the phone manufacturer. Samsung and Apple don't want to see news articles about their phones blowing up, even if it's obviously not their fault. And yes, they do tend to sell more phones if they use integrated batteries.
Rather than mandating a specific solution, a better strategy would be to tax electronic waste so that manufacturers have more financial incentive to make phones that last longer. It might also be helpful to limit the liability of anyone who sells phones with removable batteries, or have more standards for battery manufacturers, as most malfunctions will be due to 3rd party batteries.
Most phones don't have battery that is removable. But they are indeed serviceable. The battery alone is generally about 10 to 20 usd. And depends on where you are, add the service fee. Your phone is again good for 2 or 3 years. It's really just a tiny portion of new phone consider high end phones today went up to 1000~1500 usd range.
The official vendor normally have an artificially high service fee because they want you to buy a new one instead which is much more profitable. But servicing it in third party vendors isn't that expensive.
That's true, but it's also true that the inconvenience of paying $50-$100 and not having your phone for a day (and risking it being damaged) is enough to cause quite a few people to buy a new phone.
I've replaced the battery in most of my phones over the past decade, but that's because I don't like the larger form factor of new phones. Right now I'm on the iPhone 13 mini. Before that I had a 2nd gen iPhone SE (the same form factor as the iPhone 5). If I could get the form factor of an iPhone 4 and the specs of a modern phone, I'd probably be willing to pay $1,000. Unfortunately, like the headphone jack enthusiasts, people with my preferences are too small of a market segment to be worth going after.
That doesn’t mean the first phone is waste! There’s nothing wrong with wanting to buy a new phone.
The law won’t reduce smartphone ewaste. It will just satisfy the people who want removable batteries over sleaker design.
The battery is serviceable and it can be done quite easily and cheaply. In fact it’s done billions of times over.
Really just nanny state regulation, which as typical, will not bring any benefit and impose tremendous compliance costs and actually make some products worse.
Before the iPhone came we actually had replaceable batteries on most phones and it worked really well. Battery contacts degrading is definitely not a problem for a phone that has a lifetime of maximum of like 7 years.
Yes waterproofing becomes harder but it is not impossible.
Manufacturing costs are also not an issue since most phones have margins beyond 300%.
Most phones sold have very low and sometimes negative margins, actually. The high-end phones arena which Apple dominates is actually a minority of total phones sold.
Many repair shops will put old or cheap batteries in your phone. Even if they buy an expensive one they don't necessarily know what it is.
There are a lot of waterproof connectors on the market. They pretty much all work but if a standard is chosen it will absolutely be one that works.
I've used a good few battery powered tools, even cloths. If any manufacturer made [say] a drill with a glued battery I wouldn't use it if you paid me for it. You just walk to the charger, swap the battery and get back to whatever you were doing. There is nothing special about phones that deserves special consideration.
I wonder if the battery can be smaller if you can easily bring a few extra. My cameras have very small ones 700mah-ish specially when compared to the size of the camera. It is never a real issue. Just bring more batteries. Say phones have 4-5 times the mah and last 8 to 30 hours. You could slide on a battery with a bump and get 60 hours or a slim one with only 4-15 hours. That will eventually outperform the degrading cell.
I don't know where innovation is at but I imagine we could see new batteries with much better size to power ratio. If you already have the newest phone it would be a no-brainer.
Considering how many people are using cases and even wallet cases, probably very many people. The case/wallet can be attached to the phone as a replacement to the normal backplate, making it much less bulky, just as Samsung did forever ago.
Yet nobody is making high-end plastic phones anymore. Because nobody would buy them (just like no nobody cared about replaceable batteries so all companies stopped making them).
I don’t think that the case situation is necessarily rational but people generally seem to prefer more fancy/expensive/better looking phones these days.
That's just wrong. A port is not necessarily a hole through the case. It may be just a concave area. The water doesn't necessarily get in through ports either - there's lots of water-tight designs there.
well, batteries must be also certified. so yeah if you buy black market discarded faulty batteries on random site, you can expect a problem. of course catching all these sellers of crappy fake certified batteries becomes the responsibility of market regulator, but that is their job as far as i can tell.
> You would double or triple the lifespan of a ton of things.
Until they get dropped in the toilet.
Phones have gotten more waterproof as the batteries have gotten more permanently secured (not to mention induction charging). It's not a spurious correlation.
I am certainly very pro-removable-battery, but I feel like it's a safe bet your diving torch uses a round screw-on battery cover that is easy to get a reliable seal with even pressure across the whole thing compared to a flat rectangular opening like a phone battery. They are not comparable.
Yes, that’s true it’s a round screw on cap on the torch.
However, my casio G-Shock often comes with me and it’s only protected by a flat surface pushing on a gasket through 4 tiny screws.. the battery inside is a coin shape.
I didn't say it was impossible, just that the flashlight comparison is not great because it's not only a much easier design to seal but it's also a lot more tolerant of leaks.
it looks like you thinking about the excuses not the solutions. if you can't solve this problem does not mean that there is no one in the market who can't. and so we as consumers will reward the one who can't solve these new constraints presented by regulations.
That's not relevant. Your phone does not need to work for a long time underwater. The phone can be perfectly waterproof even if there's water between phone and battery.
My phone is a lot more sensitive to water intrusion. Having dropped totally non-waterproof flashlights in pools as a kid they'll generally still work even if totally flooded. Even if they get bad enough to stop working they'll almost certainly work perfectly once dried out.
I'm not denying that there are some trade-offs, but I'm also not strictly speaking about phones here. Think electric toothbrushes, trimmers, Bluetooth speakers and the other endless amounts of electric things with rechargeable batteries that don't have the space constraints of a phone.
It's weird to me that your line of thinking is actually a thing. It is not difficult to make a water-tight battery compartment for an electric toothbrush, but also make it trivial to open up and replace the battery. Hell, I just did a quick search for "electric toothbrush AAA battery", and these things exist and presumably work fine.
I feel like modern phones and the marketing around them (mostly from Apple) has pushed this nonsense that it's difficult to make water-resistant or water-proof electronics that still have a user-replaceable battery. Unfortunately this marketing seems to be working. Worked on you, at least. Gaskets, o-rings, and pressure seals are old, time-tested technology.
Admittedly it isn't as easy to make a water-resistant smartphone as it is to make water-resistant electric toothbrush. But it's far from impossible.
A toothbrush doesn't have the same space constraints, so they can just have relatively large seals, and they seal a relatively small opening (enough to fit a AA battery through).
It might well be possible to do this in a phone, but this sort of reasoning to come to that conclusion seems faulty. Like saying "Phones should be able to blow buildings apart. After all, tanks do it, so it's clearly possible."
It's not my area of expertise so I might just be delusional here, but from my understanding phones are difficult to make waterproof if they had replaceable batteries because they require a massive lid that spans across the entire phone while having a limited amount of thickness to work with and also because they have some expectations about the depth at which they remain waterproof. You don't necessarily have these constraints with a toothbrush. You can have a small opening at the bottom where you insert a tall battery and have plenty of height left to make a waterproof hatch. You're also unlikely to submerge your toothbrush in more than 50cm of water, like in the event of dropping it in the bathtub.
> Also, anecdotally, I’ve never had a sonicare toothbrush battery die. They still last weeks after many many years of use.
Sure, these exist too, though it doesn't reflect the majority of items which cheap out on all components, including batteries.
> Also, anecdotally, I’ve never had a sonicare toothbrush battery die. They still last weeks after many many years of use.
It’s the same for me, the whole toothbrush died two times shortly after warranty ended, with the battery having no issues. Not touching sonicare ever again. The cheap honeywell Chinese whatever brand is far more reliable for a small fraction of the price.
but you don't go diving with your bathroom devices. they need just splash protection which is not that complicated. i bet inventive competitor can come up with how to solve this problem efficiently and be rewarded by market.
I never understood that. Apple claims (for the iPhone Pro Max):
> Rated IP68 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes) under IEC standard 60529
But then, the fine print says:
> iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max are splash, water, and dust resistant and were tested under controlled laboratory conditions with a rating of IP68 under IEC standard 60529 (maximum depth of 6 meters up to 30 minutes). Splash, water, and dust resistance are not permanent conditions. Resistance might decrease as a result of normal wear. Do not attempt to charge a wet iPhone; refer to the user guide for cleaning and drying instructions. Liquid damage not covered under warranty.
What is the difference here between being water proof and water resistant?
Is it because water proof is permanent and resistant is time based?
Doesn't that mean that nothing is water proof? A submarine then is also only water resistant, because they have depth limits.
Lastly, they're advertising something, but then stating it's not covered under warranty. Doesn't that go against the Warranty of Merchantability?
iPhone and submarines have different limitations. Submarines have a depth limit because they are (mostly) empty shells at very high pressure and the hull implodes, which is not the case of iPhones. For iPhones, being submerged for extended periods of time water will slowly get in at very low rates, but given enough time it will accumulate to significant quantities to do damage.
EU cant deal with single use e-cigarettes!
Just think about how much e-waste they generate, for years nothing has been done about it.
On the contrary: when recently Polish government considered banning them, they have stepped down because it would require notifying the EU(also "lobbying" aka corruption. One person present at the meeting when the matter was discussed couldn't recall on whose behalf he was there, but treated to sue if called a lobbyist).
You have the money. Buy things with replacable batteries. Fairphone 5, Google Pixel, Saksung Galaxy Xcover. These are all good phones. Encourage your friends to get them too. Let's make it the norm. Boycott locked-down unfixable hardware.
Often for me not the hardware was the bottleneck but the software - I had some old phones which became unusable because half of the essential software would not work anymore on the outdated android versions - same with iPhone, it gets updates for some years but if I can’t use e.g my banking app the phone is useless - these ungodly apps are half the reason I am forced to use this machine in the first place…
Wow, sorry for the misinformation. I misremembered. Yes, I'd definitely choose a Fairphone over an Xcover. (I did this time). The Xcover is very repairable compared to most phones but still a pain in the ass (plus locked bootloader) compared to a Fairphone.
The problem is the same as with "compact" phones - there are only few models so the choice is very limited and they are usually "so-so" (or have other issues).
The problem is, as always, with marketing - it's easier to sell "this is newer/better because <x> parameter is higher" [1] so we have gigantic phones with more megapixel cameras and higher waterproof rating though I'd argue that more people would be affected by dying battery than by lack of waterproofing… (no data to back it though). Anecdotally I were changing all my previous phones because the batter was dying and never in 20 years had issue with phone being sumberged...
Those are just dumb trends :/ I would love for a phone that has lumia design - it was polycarbon/rubbery, had easy access to battery and yet was super sturdy and I didn't feel the need to buy yet another cover because, to bump the margins, whole effin world is going "premium".
Same with cars so you have less and less choice for a normal sized city-car and everything has to be "crossover" or "SUV"... ffs...
Which devices don’t have replaceable batteries? No iPhone had a battery that couldn’t be replaced for maybe 10% or the purchase cost or so. Why do people consider a smartphone with a degraded battery ”e-waste”? Just go have the battery replaced?
I'm kind of annoyed none of the articles I've read about this have mentioned the agreement the European Commission made with several smartphone manufacturers back in 2009, which came into effect around 2011: that's when (most of) the manufacturers agreed to ditch proprietary connectors in favor of (micro-) usb.
Sure, it wasn't a law. And we went from micro-usb to usb-c, but I've read so many articles claiming "the end of a drawer filled with different chargers is here!", when that basically already happened over 10 years ago.
Wiat, I recently obtained a thermal camera with USB C that charges only woth USB A -> USB C cable, but not with any C->C cable. Am I understanding correctly that adding a pullup resistor to the camera could solve it?
The USB-C spec added cc1 and cc2 which allow a device to tell the host what voltage to provide. Since not all devices need special voltages and an extra IC cost money there is the option to tie both cc1 and cc2 to a 5.1K pulldown resistor each. This tells the host to deliver 5V at max 3A.
The maker of your device like many just switched the connector from microUSB to USB-C not reading the spec.
So yes, if you add 2 pulldown 5.1k resistors your device should also charge off a USB-C host. That may however not be worth the effort as to how small USB-C connectors pin footprints can be.
Recently bought an ipad mini 6th gen and I notice that although it seems to have a USB-C charge port, if you use a regular old USB-C to USB-A cable and wall-wart it only charges to 75%. You have to use the apple-supplied USB-C (at both ends) cable to charge to 100%. Not sure what is going on there exactly but it seems like malicious compliance.
Or as this hasn’t been widely reported something else is going on…
Try different chargers, there’s a lot of defective hardware out there. Also it’s at 80%, but there’s a setting on iPhones and possibly iPads etc that avoids charging to 100% to preserve long term battery life if you’re going to leave the device plugged in long term.
I don’t know about iPads, but my iPhone shows a message when the delayed charge thing is active. I think it’s even one of those always on notifications you can’t swipe away.
Delayed charge (waiting to charge fully or charging the last ~20% slowly to just-in-time for your alarm) is a different setting, though I don't recall the name for the "Only charge to 80%" one
> To change your charging option with iPhone 15 models and later, go to Settings > Battery > Charging and choose an option. You can choose a charge limit between 80 percent and 100 percent in 5 percent increments.
Probably a combination of the devices being old enough and the battery not being large enough that a lot of people would not find 80% of the already-degraded capacity of their device reasonable, and not wanting to have to explain to customers why their friend’s phone allows it and theirs doesn’t if they both have the same model.
Its not the setting. It charges fine to 100% with the same wall-wart and a tiny usb-a to usb-c adapter then the apple cable. But not happy with my regular usb-a to usb-c cable (that works fine with everything else). Or any of the other cables in my house. A message pops up about non-compatible cable. I suspect the ipad has been designed to be deliberately fussy. I'm in europe, if that makes any difference.
I charge my iPad Mini with a variety of chargers, all the way to 100%. None of my cables are from Apple, only some of my (USB-C) chargers are not from Apple.
Are you sure it is because of the cable? By default Apple devices only charge to 80% when you plug them in and then do the final 20% later around when they anticipate you are going to unplug it.
Its not that. It shows a message about 'non compatible cable'. And when I use the apple cable it quite happily charges to 100% with no quibbles. And the non apple cable is a good quality one that works fine with everything else. I suspect the ipad has been designed to be deliberately fussy.
Our household has a number of iPads and never had an issue with any non-Apple usb-c cable I’ve used to charge them with, mostly Anker branded but one or two AmazonBasics or Cable Matters brand. I’ve never seen an incompatible cable warning, my suspicion is it’s a cable that doesn’t have the right signaling to go above 5V, so it’s stuck charging at 5V and the iPad prefers to charge at 9v or 12v.
It’s likely that your wall-wart doesn’t provide enough watts to fully charge your iPad mini, and/or that there’s some reason the USB-A side of that cable isn’t adequate for what the iPad mini needs.
If you want to test, consider trying with a non-Apple wall-wart for which the rated wattage is equal to or greater than the one which Apple provides with your iPad mini and which uses a USB-C connection rather than a USB-A one. If it comes with a USB-C to USB-C cable, use that, otherwise get one that supports USB-C PD and enough watts to match the iPad mini’s needs.
That's not fully true, and even if it's partially true in some cases (this depends on the chemistry of the battery): volts and watts aren't the same thing. You can be fully capable of supplying 5v@2.4A and not capable of supplying 12v@1A which are the same number of watts.
Battery tech is a horrible black hole that is not very fun to dig into, chargers are a little bit more transparent: with markings for various voltages and amperages printed on the device.
iPad batteries output 3.7v if I'm not mistaken, but I'm unsure what they charge with.
A 3.7V nominal li-ion battery would peak at about 4.5V while charging. A bit high, but a well designed circuit should be able to do that off 5V. Besides, 75% is far short of where the voltage starts to spike.
>volts and watts aren't the same thing. You can be fully capable of supplying 5v@2.4A and not capable of supplying 12v@1A which are the same number of watts.
For the layman, the equation is Volts x Amperes = Watts.
Where if we use the common water examples: Voltage is electric charge ("water pressure" or "volume of water"), Amperage is electric current ("water flow rate"), and Wattage is electrical energy ("amount of water transferred").
2V x 6A, 4V x 3A, 1V x 12A, 12V x 1A and similar are all 12W but they are obviously very different in nature.
Agree. I bought a "Chargie" just to get this feature, and it doesn't work with my wireless chargers worth a darn. I would pay at least $40 x 5 units for chargers that reliably stop at 75% with no software required.
I have some Chargie units, but found them finicky enough with the bluetooth connection that I've abandoned them for devices' built-in 80% charge limit, even if the exact charging pattern isn't quite what I'd like.
What? Isn't that a function of the device? The only alternative would be to start discharging at 75%, and I don't want my batteries to constantly cycle while plugged in. I leave them plugged in so they'll run off of wall power.
> The only alternative would be to start discharging at 75%
Not necessarily, Chargie lets you configure minimum charge, minimum charge for a cycle, time to charge, etc.
In practice, what it looks like for my devices:
1. I plug in my phone when I go to bed.
2. Phone charges to 40% (if it's not already >40%) and stops charging.
3. At 5am or so, the phone is still at ~38%, it then charges to 80% and stops.
4. I get up and my phone is still at ~78% charge.
For devices with more software capabilities than phones (e.g. macOS) you can use software (e.g. Al Dente) that will cap the charge level and run off wall power. In practice this means that if I plug my laptop in at 90% charge, it will take weeks to drop to 80% since it's running off wall power, and unless I'm doing particularly high power-draw things the drop to 80% comes down to the battery's self-discharge rate.
I have a number of quality, 3rd party USB PD rated cables which work without issue on iPhone 16, iPad Mini 6g, MacBook Pro. Both with and without 1st party chargers. Admittedly the options for consumers in the USB-C space are a confusing mess, but I’ve never had problems with stuff from brands like Ugreen or Anker where USB-PD support is specifically advertised.
I don’t believe it’s the cable as much as the charging brick that is causing that. I have that issue with a MacBook Pro, using the Apple provided cable plugged into a usb-c port on my power strip. If I use the power brick, it charges fine.
No because they're not portable, don't use it for charging, and are not included in the list of devices that it applies to. Even a cordless phone is not considered portable because you can't use it very far from the base station.
If your voltage matches one of the PD levels they work okay but many common voltages like 12v usually end up being very charger dependent. I've got one of the 12v pd triggers that on 9/10 of the PD enabled charges I've used just drops to 9v.
I had thought briefly that something like this should exist, but then dismissed the thought, since such devices would be too much to hope for in the current environment of corporate enshittification. Slight amount of faith in humanity restored.
Yes, the USB Power Delivery 2.0 spec traded the 12 volt level for 9 and 15 volt levels, so not all PD 2.0 capable chargers support 12v output as there are very few devices that actually natively use PD 1.0 12v mode. Almost all devices requesting it are so-called "trigger" devices used to adapt older equipment to run on USB power.
I have a fun-restoring fact for you though: USB PD 3.0 in 2018 added a feature called Programmable Power Supply which allows a device being powered to request any voltage from 3.3 to 21 volts in 20mV increments. As support for this feature is required for a product to carry the "Certified USB Fast Charger" logo it's pretty much standard on any decent charger. I have yet to encounter a single PPS-capable charger that didn't also support the fixed 12v mode.
TBH, wall warts with voltage selector and 10+ detachable types of barrel connectors predate corporate enshittification, which is probably what makes PD variant possible.
That's not entirely true - the Tesla has a few hundred watts of overhead when charging - so a 240 W charger would probably not get over that hill. You could maybe keep the screen on and watch a movie while connected via USB-C.
I agree. I have decided to just never buy another thing that cannot be powered by Type C or C13/14. Maybe exceptions for PoE, I guess, if I had to use an ethernet cable on it anyway.
The European Commission has a section in the Q&A about that[1] where they say that the charger side of things will be regulated in the Ecodesign Regulation.
Ecodesign will regulate things like power delivery, which includes charger and PoE efficiency and characteristics.
And remove the need for cookie warnings on official government websites. Like, why are you using tracking so invasive that it needs the warning, on a government site.
I suggest de-Kindle-ing yourself. Kobo or anything else with Koreader is great.
I had contacts with people in the Kindle unit (I used to work at Amazon), and apparently the focus is on making as much profit as possible. So the Kindle ecosystem is probably going to be on the downwards spiral pretty soon.
am I the only one who do not like usb-c-s? the one on macbooks is nice, but the one on samsungs screams it is not reliable (I have 3 phones with the same issue of not working port). Something with two simple pins would be nicer. Or make usb-c standard, that would still charge, even if port is broken/not perfectly aligned. Like a fallback to several pins. Also, the rigid cables on usb-c often break (maybe that is by design, but)...
Yes because the pre-usb charging world was so great and innovative /s
Hey remember when the Motorola Razr wouldn't charge on a regular USB port unless you had a specific driver (or had to use the actual charger?). Amazing innovation
Yes, all the innovations of today are the result of that wild world of that era. Before you become mature, you must have problems of growing up
No one regulated the number of mobile operating systems, and there were really many of them, even before the era of smartphones.
Now there are 2 main ones and a couple of outsiders, all the rest died in the competitive struggle
Except most of that "innovation" didn't move to sane connectors by themselves, it was due to exactly the same pressure from the EU, that was beginning to propose such regulation
The only manufacturer that didn't do anything about it was Apple
I worry about the durability of USB C ports. I have 4 laptops >5 years old with loose USB C ports, Apple and HP brands, and yes i have cleaned them looking for lint. I don't know if it's these specific laptops or if the port is designed for obsolescence.
The same thing existed for micro USB before but Apple could not agree to that or a new standard, so the EU said "USB-C". The law provides for upgrades and mandates compliance with the spec, including PD. If the spec upgrades, the law does so automatically.
USB-C is a horrible standard to consolidate on because of all the confusion about various sorts of USB-C cables (with exactly the same physical connectors) and thunderbolt cables.
Similarly, I’m glad Tesla convinced all the other American manufacturers to go with NACS for the American market because the CCS plugs are monstrosities.
CCS is great in Europe. You can plug in your normal 3 phase 400V EVSE and charge at 22kW at home, and twice a year when you need it, you can uncover the little extra flap for 350kW DC charging for on route to your holiday.
USB-C suffers from unclear naming problems sure, but in my experience most of the problems are actually caused by shady marketing pages. If they just clearly marked cables and ports with their capabilities, using the same physical connector would only be a benefit.
Those aren't really going to have an effect on the charging though. This standardization is only concerned about charging.
So no one is going to pick a theoretical "USB-D" that requires every cable to be able to carry 40 gb/s to be a standard. I don't need a 40 gb/s cable to charge a battery pack.
I have at least two devices that are “USB-C” for charging but will only work with USB-A to USB-C cables. USB-C wall warts seem to need a handshake the device doesn’t do. So I still can’t throw out my old wall warts and cables. It’s terrible.
It can be done with 2 resistors. It's kinda required because of the same port on both ends. If I plug a battery into a phone, should the phone charge the battery or should the battery charge the phone?
USB-C is great for 5V charging. And probably not awful for PD either.
All the weird data transport, seems like a big pile of maybe it will work, maybe it won't. I think most cables will do usb 2.0 data and probably usb 3.0 data, which covers a lot. I've managed not to need any of the other things, so avoidance seems to be pretty good. The one exception being the nintendo switch that does hdmi over usb-c, but sticking with their dock works enough for me.
These types of EU regulations (like the USB-C one on phones) don't prescribe anything. If the industry comes up with better tech, that's great, people can move on to that. What happens in the meanwhile is that the old standard remains on the device alongside the better system so that people aren't forced into wastefully tossing away dozens of cables overnight.
It's infinitely better than the absolute clown fiesta we used to have with phones, in either case.
> Regulations work best when they set a minimum requirement.
Not when the involved makers are incentisized otherwise.
Makers have the freedom to submit better options in the future. But it can't be the other way around.
I'm waiting now for Bluetooth to also have it's USB-C moment, and force every consumer device to have their core functionality accessible through a standardized communication protocol.
We'd get makers to submit better open specs, instead of the situation we have now.
The European Parliament is advertising this as a win for the EU. Yet it isn’t entirely uncontroversial and there’s plenty of voices arguing it’s overreaching - easy to argue this matches the broad definition of political weaponization as-is.
This is about Directive (EU) 2022/2380[1]. It does mention USB-PD:
> In so far as they are capable of being recharged by means of wired charging at voltages higher than 5 Volts, currents higher than 3 Amperes or powers higher than 15 Watts, the categories or classes of radio equipment referred to in point 1 of this Part shall:
> 3.1. incorporate the USB Power Delivery, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021 “Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power – Part 1-2: Common components – USB Power Delivery specification”;
This hopefully means the end to standards-violating nonsense like SuperVOOC? Originally SuperVOOC wasn't USB-PD compatible at all. Now, AIUI, SuperVOOC is partly USB-PD compatible, but only to lower wattages.
Why would it? If you can charge the phone with PD, but also with proprietary standards that offer something better it would meet the regulation. Seems like the best of both worlds.
Again, why would it be worse? There’s very real benefits to some of the proprietary standards that you can’t get from PD. Just because PD offers higher wattage doesn’t mean the overall charging is faster. If you have to generate a ton of heat to convert the incoming power to voltage that the battery can take, it will hinder how fast you can charge your phone. This is especially problematic at higher voltages.
The legislation covers radio equipment up to 100W, also power delivery is directly mentioned.
For ‘fast’ charging, the radio equipment listed in Part I of Annex Ia, if it can be recharged by means of wired charging at voltages higher than 5 volts, currents higher than 3 amperes or powers higher than 15 watts, must: (a) incorporate the USB Power Delivery (USB PD), as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-2 (as referenced in Annex Ia); and (b) allow for the full functionality of the said USB PD if it incorporates any additional charging protocol.
26. Is a radio equipment allowed to support a higher charging power (e.g. 40 W) when using a proprietary charging protocol than when using USB PD (e.g. 30 W)?
The RED (in its Annex Ia, Part I, point 3.2), ensures interoperability with different charging protocols. For that purpose, radio equipment which is subject to the ‘common charger’ rules must ‘ensure that any additional charging protocol allows for the full functionality of the USB Power Delivery referred to in point 3.1, irrespective of the charging device used.’*
I’m not sure it matters; I hope market economy should do the rest. I believe it’s slightly cheaper to manufacture a device with a single USB-C port which supports PD, compared to a device with two ports, one 5W USB-C and some other port for faster charging.
A reason to not demand USB-PD, such law would prevent upgrades to later better version of that thing.
> A reason to not demand USB-PD, such law would prevent upgrades to later better version of that thing.
Can we apply some common sense please? You're right that not allowing revised standards would be silly. So, they simply update the law to reference newer versions of the standard. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg_del/2023/1717/oj
How is a better standard going to be developed, though? Manufacturers aren't going to innovate, since they aren't allowed to sell anything besides USB-C.... so who is going to do the research and development for better designs, and how are we going to compare different possible improvements if manufacturers aren't allowed to try out anything new?
They are allowed to try out new stuff as long as the baseline is also met. Hence no problem for Apple with MagSafe for example, because their laptops also have USB-C charging.
Stabdards development is very much done to push regulators to adapt new things. The incentive is either to be able to develop new products that give a reason to upgrade, or royalties from the standard, or patent license money.
Instead of mandating something straightforward like fixed-voltage barrel plugs, they settled on horribly overengineered and complex USB-C. Typical bureaucracy.
Phones can stay with USB like the vast majority were already using. I'm referring to laptops, where a 20V barrel plug was already a de-facto standard, and other devices that have no business being anywhere near USB.
everyone except a single stubborn, different-thinking company
...and if the only purpose of this law was to go after one company (which I personally don't agree with the decisions of, but this is the wrong way to do it), that reflects even worse on the bureaucracy.
> Phones can stay with USB like the vast majority were already using.
You are forgetting that the stance of EU was known for more than a decade, if not two, at this point so when you say "were already using" you are actually saying "they were aware that this day would come so the majority agreed on using USB".
> I'm referring to laptops, where a 20V barrel plug was already a de-facto standard
What do you mean by standard? These connectors come in various sizes and pin configurations, there is no standard to speak of. I don't think that I've ever seen laptops of different manufacturers to be able to use the same charger.
What do you mean by standard? These connectors come in various sizes and pin configurations, there is no standard to speak of.
There's only a small number of them, easily convertible with a passive adapter; but some of the ones with an ID chip do need to go away, preferably replaced by resistor-sensing for higher power outputs.
I don't think that I've ever seen laptops of different manufacturers to be able to use the same charger.
The actual manufacturers are Compal, Inventec, Pegatron, Wistron, etc. and they can definitely use the same charger.
The point I'm making is there was already a convergence towards a simple de-facto standard for laptops, one that has been in existence for over 2 decades. Yet the EU decided to force them to change to the most complex standard, with far more fragile connectors.
Another example: Shokz had to switch from their magnetic connector to USB-C for the OpenRun bone conduction headphones. I think it makes no sense given the small size of their device and it makes it less durable (there is a small cap to protect the USB-C from water, which is easily broken) and probably one reason they don't market it as IP68 anymore.
USB-C is already a de-facto standard, supports a wide range of voltages and with enough current to be able to charge even beefy laptops. You also don't have to support all the complexity; if you just want to power a simple device that needs 5V with at most 1A or so, then you only need two resistors on that device.
Sure, it has some issues in some of the more complex cases (mostly because not all USB cables have all the wires they should), but I don't see any alternative that will give an overall better experience.
I understand the reasoning behind this law, but I'm not sure if it's a good idea in the long term. Had the EU passed a similar law a decade ago, they would be stuck on mini or micro USB today. There will probably be some plug that is superior to USB-C at some point. How will the EU switch to it? Only the big players (Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc) have the power to lobby for a change.
If the goal of this law is to reduce electronic waste, it seems like a better solution would be to tax electronic waste. That would discourage other kinds of e-waste (like those adapters for micro SD cards) while still letting manufacturers to choose other connectors for niche use cases. It would also make it possible for companies to move to a new standard without waiting for the EU to allow it.
The EU didn't mandate micro USB. It was a voluntary standard and it considered a manufacturer to be in compliance if they shipped an adapter (which is what Apple did). The fact that it was voluntary and allowed adapters is why USB-C managed to take off. Also it took until 2021 before the EU decided they needed to change the standard.
Low-level EU Regulations like this take approximately 3 years to be drafted and adopted (validated).
A whole decade is often needed if the member states consider a new mandate is needed, typically a directive or regulation or treaty clause giving the EC authority and a framework to regulate something.
Any update to this regulation will have to wait at least 3 years after a new standard has been agreed on. And there will probably be a period for adoption by the industry, typically 2 years. So at least 5 years after everyone has agreed what is needed. It most probably won't be updated for the next 25 years.
Considering the number of stupid laws that haven’t been updated, and the conflicting interests every time an update is proposed, I answer that it can be safely assumed the law will never be updated in most circumstances.
The assumption that a law that directly influences millions of people daily lives and has close to 0 direct budget costs associated with it won't be updated when it becomes counterproductive is quite funny.
The EU's cookie law still requires a banner for everything except "strictly necessary cookies",[1] which means you must have a banner if you use cookies to save preferred language, default location, or any internal analytics data (such as New Relic, Datadog, etc).
So yes, I think updating the law will take a significant amount of time.
You do not need a banner, you need informed consent. I'm sure there are other ways of getting consent other than a half screen pop-up with a big red accept button on first visit, but they probably won't get 70% "opt in" rate.
Law: You have to get some form of affirmative consent if you want to do specific often-abused things.
Companies: We'll do it in the most obnoxious way possible ("here are our 853 technology partners... no, there's not a 'deselect all' option, have fun clicking") so people blame the law instead of the industry that didn't want to allow consent at all.
There's always a deselect all option (or rather, the equivalent "accept only the technically required ones"), because it's required by law. Sometimes the operator tries to hide the option. That, too, is illegal.
Selecting the language you want actually sounds like "functionality that has been explicitly requested by the user" who "did a positive action to request a service with a clearly defined perimeter". This is clearly allowed.
Section 3.6 says that UI customizations such as language preferences are only exempt if they last for a session (no more than a few hours). Anything longer requires a cookie notice, though they do claim that a less prominent notice than a modal is acceptable.
Page 8 of the PDF[1]: 3.6 UI customization cookies
> These customization functionalities are thus explicitly enabled by the user of an information society service (e.g. by clicking on button or ticking a box) although in the absence of additional information the intention of the user could not be interpreted as a preference to remember that choice for longer than a browser session (or no more than a few additional hours). As such only session (or short term) cookies storing such information are exempted under CRITERION B.
It specifically says that a consent notice is required for UI customization cookies that persist more than a few hours, and it gives an example of preferred language as one of those UI customizations.
> Page 8 of the PDF[1]: 3.6 UI customization cookies
What's "Opinion 04/2012 on Cookie Consent Exemption" adopted on 2012, 4 years before GDPR?
Edit On top of that, actual quote:
--- start quote ---
"They may be session cookies or have a lifespan counted in weeks or months, depending on their purpose
... addition of additional information in a prominent location (e.g. “uses cookies” written next to the flag) would constitute sufficient information for valid
consent to remember the user’s preference for a longer duration,
--- end quote ---
12 years since this opinion, 8 years since GDPR, and you still have no idea about either.
You're linking to a fake website made by the private company behind Proton Mail, that tries to present itself as an official EU site. What they claim will be in their own financial interest, and not what the GDPR law says.
From the horses mouth:
"GDPR.EU is a website operated by Proton Technologies AG, which is co-funded by Project REP-791727-1 of the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union. This is not an official EU Commission or Government resource. The europa.eu webpage concerning GDPR can be found here. Nothing found in this portal constitutes legal advice."
GDPR isn't the cookie law. It is a law regulating storage of personal data overall. The banners are a result of greed and incompetence. The companies made stupid amount of money by closely profiling every single individual using cookies and fingerprinting. They are in malicious compliance and if the behavior continues the regulation may become more stringent.
I never said the GDPR was the cookie law. I was just linking to a site that summarized the actual law. If storing preferred language in a cookie (without any uniquely identifying info) does not require a cookie banner, then I'd be happy to be corrected on that.
You don’t need an intrusive banner on page open. You just need consent.
If the user is saving a setting like a language preference, just put “by saving this preference you agree for us to store the setting” next to the option/OK button (it’s really implicit just like their shopping cart example, but this is if you want to be really paranoid)
Well, considering the messy state of the different charging ports, that would not have been a bad idea either. I do not think it would have stopped usb-c from taking over, in the same way that the current legislation does not prevent revising it.
Standardisation is a good thing over all, and, for good or for worse, it often requires governmental entities to move it forward. If anything, it also creates a leveling field that promotes innovation for what really matters. Only big tech love the alternative, as part of sustaining an oligopolic status.
> in the same way that the current legislation does not prevent revising it.
How would that work? USB-C became widespread because manufacturers gradually started adding it to their devices instead of micro-USB/whatever. As far as I understand that would be illegal now? So how could any new standard gain any traction?
Legislatures have limited bandwidth and they tend to consider a topic "closed" once they have passed a law. So flawed laws often stick around for decades.
That's why laws are written in broad strokes and redirect exact specification to regulations written by regulatory committees, at least in Continental Europe (i.e. Civil Law system). You don't need to make new laws just update regulatory text.
Regulations to address the ambiguities and gaps in legislation, or to update them within specifically legislated boundaries, happen often in common-law systems too.
The problem is that those regulatory committees always put some kind of idealistic nonplus ultra standards into the regulations without respecting the real world.
"Sorry kids, no kindergarden here for you because the regulator requires us to build parking space for SUVs and obeying this means we can't build enough parking space for all your parents which would break another rule. So we'll do nothing."
Parent was discussing systematic issues and I was answering to that. In fact, what I'm getting downvoted for (the problem of outsourced over-engineered regulations that frequently contradict each other) is openly discussed, at least in Germany.
Maybe you should check yourself in "seeing anti Europeans everywhere".
Sure, but here we have a concrete example of a regulatory committee making a rule that apparently doesn't do what you fear. So it seems like it's certainly possible for regulatory committees not to do what you described?
I get your point, but painting with such broad strokes honestly just poisons the discussion. If you're rejecting everything on principle by applying a slippery slope, why should people care about your position?
Lastly, I'm not sure I understand what "seeing anti Europeans everywhere" you're talking about, could you expand on that?
Not at all. E.g. Germany requires housing projects to build "enough parking lots" for newly built flats[0]. The result is that flats either don't get built at all or "green surfaces" (or playgrounds) get transformed into parking lots.
So the _real world_ result is, as a society, we favor parking lots over homelessness or green surfaces which is contradictory to pretty much everything else we're discussing. These laws are from times in which the legislator thought of them to be a good idea. Times have changed, the regulation hasn't and nobody is talking about exactly those issues. There's plenty more of those examples which can only lead you to the conclusion that most finely granular regulation is rather harmful than helpful.
It is more that they never get around to addressing many of them, as legislators/regulators have limited bandwidth. Tons of things just fall off the wagon.
Yes, indeed, some things about it are better and some worse. Which means it’s good for consumers to have a choice, and more importantly, for companies with a track record of good taste in designing high-quality smartphones to have a free hand.
I trust Apple to make decisions that lead to a phone I enjoy using a lot more than I trust the EU regulatory bureaucracy to do so.
Consumers don't have a choice, though. Up until recently, if you wanted an iPhone, you get Lightning, and that's it. That's great for you, since you believe it's the best cable/connector for you. But if someone wanted something different, they had no choice, unless they wanted a different kind of smartphone. And I don't think someone is going to make an iPhone -> Android switch simply because of the cable. That's a bit absurd.
There are a lot of laws and not all of them get updated, as regulatory bodies only have so much time, attention, and political capital. The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies. GDPR's right to be forgotten hasn't been updated to stop abuse by people who want to hide their past crimes or controversial behavior. The EU's laws on self-driving vehicles still restrict maximum lateral acceleration and lane change behavior, forcing vehicle manufacturers to gimp their software in the EU.
The new USB-C law could be improved significantly if it was a tax instead of a mandate. There is a dollar value associated with the cost of recycling proprietary chargers. Taxing that would be a source of revenue for the EU and allow other chargers for purposes that we can't predict today. The current law is purely a cost center for both governments and manufacturers. And since everyone agrees it will need to be updated at some point, it's the law equivalent of tech debt.
I'm surprised at the responses I've gotten considering how I didn't say I was against this law. I just said I'm not sure if it's a good idea in the long term. And so far, the replies haven't engaged with most of my points. The EU's mandate helps big companies at the expense of small ones, does nothing to discourage electronic waste unrelated to chargers, and makes it harder to switch to whatever will come after USB-C. Yes it's possible for the EU to change the law, but considering they've started with a flawed law and they haven't updated quite a few other laws, I would bet against this law getting updated promptly.
>The EU's cookie law still requires a banner if your site uses a cookie to store something like preferred language or default location (even if it's not tied to a specific identity), as those aren't considered "strictly necessary" cookies.
This simply isn't true, and your source for this is biased as another commenter has stated.
I'm happy to be corrected on this, but your source says nothing about the kind of cookies I mentioned. Examples of strictly necessary cookies are auth sessions and shopping cart contents, not preferred language or default location. Paragraph 25 of the law states[1]:
> Where such devices, for instance cookies, are intended for a legitimate purpose, such as to facilitate the provision of information society services, their use should be allowed on condition that users are provided with clear and precise information in accordance with Directive 95/46/EC about the purposes of cookies or similar devices so as to ensure that users are made aware of information being placed on the terminal equipment they are using. Users should have the opportunity to refuse to have a cookie or similar device stored on their terminal equipment.
Is storing preferred language or default location strictly necessary, or just a legitimate purpose (and thus requires consent)? The EU has had since 2009 to clarify this, but many sites (including the news article about the USB-C law) interpret it to mean that consent is required, and thus have cookie banners for these things.
If you can't agree that the cookie law is a bad law that either needs to be repealed, clarified, or made more strict, then I don't know what to tell you. It's a perfect example of a well-intended law that causes more problems than it solves. And it's a perfect example of the EU failing to update a law with clear flaws. I don't know if the USB-C law will have a similar outcome, but considering the EU's track record, I'm not confident it will be a good thing in the long term.
It says that simply telling the user that the language setting uses a cookie is enough to obtain consent in this case. Not that you need a full blown banner. The CNIL even says you don't need consent to do it.
1) no one will invest in new charging technology because it’s an uphill battle to be approved
2) entrenched charger organizations with political connections will resist change. Their existence depends on it. You will only see change as they use regulations to starve upstarts and acquire their tech Pennie’s on the dollar.
But the good news is Europe invents almost nothing today so they can just have a friendly debate on which American or Asian tech to standardize on.
What Europe does is to educate talent, then that talent goes to America and works hard. Then their inventions come to Europe to get standardized. Meanwhile, Europe is making good money by investing in America, without the mess of being an experimental zone.
Notice how there are barely any names like John or Henry on those research papers or patents. It’s even a hot topic lately, acknowledged by the tech titans. As they say, Americans don’t do much and even if the legal entity is in the US, the capital and the talent is actually from Europe, China and India.
Unfortunately, it appears that with the rise of Maga Europe will eventually have to provide its talent a place to experiment things but the techies are fighting hard to prevent that.
This is a pretty obvious and desperate attempt to comfort yourself. Take the intellectually honest road and question why Europe (I’m European myself) has gotten itself into this sorry state and then try to do something about it.
In what way is Europe not in the mess of the experiment that is AI? It seems to me that it has all the exact same problems, without any of the benefits (the jobs, experience and money) that comes with it.
What you are claiming is as dumb as saying that Europe fixed climate change by blocking drilling in Europe and buying oil and gas from the Saudis instead.
It's just a swing into a recent hot topic and talking points around it, don't read too much into it. Everybody knows that US and EU are both way behind Asia and this EU is lagging behind USA due to regulations is just a meme, not more relevant than if Poutine is healthier than french fries.
The problem is misrepresented in online discussion. For example, typical argument is that EU doesn't have TOP10 companies by market cap and US has half of it but when you think about it market cap doesn't mean much and even if it did it would have ment capital concentration which is not a good thing by European culture. We don't want to have some ultra rich giant companies when everyone else tries to survive by the scraps, we actively try to redistribute wealth and are proud of our better gini coefficient. Europe is so not into this stuff that the "startup guys" of Europe on social media who are raving for accelerationism are just small businesses with a revenue of a restaurant on a high street but they think that they are early stages of Musk or Bezos. They just don't get it.
IMHO just look at the stuff you care about and forget using proxies like GDP or market value etc. For example, US has the largest companies by market cap but they are excited to have Taiwan opening a plant in USA that will produce chips on a few years old tech when Taiwan and Korea have the cutting edge stuff.
Examples are numerous, it goes above and beyond everything. China is not behind US in AI, in fact in some areas US is already trying to catch up. Tesla has enormous market cap but Chinese brands already displaced them in actual product sales. Americans think that self driving cars will be ready to go mainstream soon when China already has those disrupting their taxi sector.
Apple is about to become $4T company but Chinese and Koreans have all the cutting edge tech and Apple is faltering.
In military front USA boosts about how much money they spend on military only to find out that they are just paying more than they should and can't match Russia on ammunition.
While I may disagree on the overall trajectory and importance of some of these topics. I really appreciate your response, in spite of my semi-aggressive earlier responses.
I think it’s false to think that the value of these companies is just their salary. It’s about experience. Many of today’s businesses exist because their founders were given the chance to gain experience somewhere else. I can’t expect the next Volkswagen to come from a country where entrepreneurship is constrained to starting a bistro.
> We don't want to have some ultra rich giant companies when everyone else tries to survive by the scraps,
So we’d rather have nothing at all?
The extremely low salaries for tech workers is one of the best indicators. There is just not enough demand in Europe because there is no growth and very few companies doing anything innovative.
> capital concentration which is not a good thing by European culture.
Higher disposable incomes are also bot good for European culture, right?
Europe had 0 growth 2 years in a row and is in the middle of a second lost decade. Couple that with the replacement rate. Demographics are destiny. It’s over sadly. Had a good run.
Despite what people think. Lightning port survived way longer than usb-c ports do. I’ve seen phones with the usb-c port with broken middle bit. Go wobbly and lost contact on the board in the phone.
Let’s not even get into the terrible standard of usb-c where no 2 cables are the same. Some cables work on some devices…
> Lightning port survived way longer than usb-c ports do
Apple's manufactoring is usually more robust than most, so I doubt this is due to usb-c itself of the manufacturer. Personally I have seen bad usb-a port but never usb-c (and usb-c ports are supports to last for at least 10000 insert cycles, as per the standard).
> no 2 cables are the same
We can either have a single port supporting a variety of protocols, or, roughly, a port for each protocol. Considering the mostly hierarchical relationship between protocols, I very much prefer the former. Two usb-c cables are not be the same in order to sustain low prices for the lowest end of the protocols, else every cable would have to be a thunderbolt 5 cable costing 100$ or whatever. The problem is not the existence of the protocols, but the companies that make confusing marketing and the fact that the usb standards namings of the protocols is bad (see usb3.1 gen 2) (probably intended so by the same companies, but do not have any evidence or anything). Otherwise things are not that complicated.
I would much rather have different connectors for different underlying protocols: HDMI and USB-C are both really annoying in that the cable can silently be the limiting factor.
It has a nice click when plugging in even on my 4 yo device. Lasts forever. Every cable feels the same and fits perfectly because they are all made to a standard.
I have USB-C cables that are too loose or too tight. I have USB-C cables that click and that are so mushy I sometimes need to double check if they are in. USB-C wiggles in the port more than Lightning does. Lightning was a great connector both by design and because of the strict control Apple had over it. Am I sad it’s gone? Not really, but it was nice to have it when everyone else was stuck with micro usb <vomits>.
See gemini://bbs.geminispace.org/u/stack/23176 for some other notes about USB, including some notes about charging with USB-C, and about the regulations in EU.
TL;DR — short blog post where the author complains that USB-C cables are not equivalent. No technical information or dive whatsoever, and nothing about EU regulations.
Definitely wasn't worth figuring out how to access gemini://.
All this talk of "universal chargers" gets on my nerves: you're not mandating anything about chargers, just the cable connections.
Phone chargers have already been made universal for years, they're all USB-A or C. Stop saying we're revolutionizing the charger industry, we're just standardizing the fucking cable.
This regulation has been known about and in the works a long time, so it drove device manufacturers to unify their devices over their model generational upgrades leading up to this moment. They didn’t do it voluntarely.
Smooth transition was the intent - not costly surprise for manufacturers over night.
The delay was largely due to intense lobbying from manufacturers, especially Apple, which profited significantly from licensing their proprietary Lightning port.
Next up on the EU's list for 2026: Easily Changeable Batteries (you know, what every cell phone 20 years ago had before Apple).
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