491–500 of 525 posts
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Not sure you know what the phrase “drop in the bucket” means.
not sure if you're a fucking idiot. oh, wait, I am sure. you are a fucking idiot.
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Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother d…
You’re inferring something that isn’t true. The EU is not “good” or “bad” it just “is”. They do good things and bad things, however there’s a very clear delineation between pre-2004 and post-2004. It is very clear that even if it is not a direct cause then it is at least a large push. USB as a a standard existed for sure, but rarely if ever used on phones. (The only phone I can think of is the RAZR and that was actua…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#H...
USB has been used in phones for a very long time indeed.
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What is Apple is heading toward completely sealed phones with only wireless charging / data xfer and they’re nervous that the EU is going to force them to keep the physical port on the device?
Well, not that it's relevant to the topic at hand, but if they do so, I'm leaving the ecosystem. Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me. I go weeks without plugging my phone into the wall, but when I need it, I really need it.
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An IETF-style process to swap to a new standard, presumably.
Which will be captured by a bunch of manufacturers who like to innovate on "cheapest / crappiest" and who will outvotes the one manufacturer who actually innovates on "best"... As a customer, I'd like to keep the option for "best."
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Indeed, the text only speaks of a "common charger" without specifying further, so I'm somewhat surprised you make the claim the directive speaks only about one sub-part of the charger. To me things appear thus: the EP passed a directive that states mobile radio equipment should have a "common charger", sensibly letting manufacturers decide how to solve the interoperability problem. Apple then argued "well, it's not e…
Hmm. You make a good point. In my attempt at reading both of these there seems to be a clear distinction being made when it refers to cables and when it refers to chargers. It also never really mentions ports. Therefore, to me, it cares less about the port and cable on the phone half and more about the brick / part that plugs into the wall. Neither document provides a definition for "charger". So perhaps whoever is i…
The charger is obviously the thing between your phone and the power socket. It seems perfectly clear to me.
Because the entire thing is a charger. You can't use the charger without the cable. If the cable was a separate thing, fully interchangeable, the whole law wouldn't be necessary.
And they can't in hindsight decide that the cables aren't part of the "package" because they wrote in the resolution what the motivation of this law is, which is interoperability / compatibility / interchangeability and reducing waste, and if the cable part is non standard and not compatible, then obviously you'd need an additional cable to make the whole charger simply operable. Needing additional cables is what the resolution states (several times) is one of the explicit purposes, to prevent.
They also specifically discuss that wireless charging should be common as well, because not needing a cable is even better than needing the same cable.
I get the idea that sometimes EU laws are so clear and straightforward, that Americans implicitly don't trust them and expect a "gotcha!".
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I read "charger" to mean "the thing you use for charging", and not really bothering with the technical detail of exactly how this thing is made. I think reading the texts as if they spoke only of the transformer/brick itself is to narrow, and not in line with the common understanding of what a "charger" is. I will offer this suggestion of a precise definition for "charger": the complete technological assemblage requi…
You can define the charger to include the cable, and I can define the phone to include the cable. Either way it doesn’t provide much insight into the definitions with legal force.
Yeah but nobody would take you seriously. Read it again with the idea in mind that somehow the cable is "part of the phone": https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
Does the phone work without the cable? YES!
Does the charger work without the cable? NO!
Exceept ... in the case of wireless charging, yup. Which they explicitly mention. Would that mean that ... maybe ... the other kind of charging, involves cables?
Finally they state that one of the goals is reduction in the volume of cables collected and recycled.
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Apple is already using USB-C on the bit that plugs into the wall, so if that's all this is, it's nothing. Apple has protested this, so it seems like it must be more.
What is Apple is heading toward completely sealed phones with only wireless charging / data xfer and they’re nervous that the EU is going to force them to keep the physical port on the device?
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
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I am not sure I understand your argument "my toaster does not have a standard connector, so neither should my iphone"? I mean, maybe they should, or maybe none cares to regulate toasters. Or maybe its only relevant to portable electronics, so laptops should have them but toasters shouldn't. Think a bit broader - if apple wants to introduce a new phone communication standard, like 5g but different? It can't - frequenc…
If Apple introduced a phone that didn’t comply with the 5G standard it wouldn’t be able to interoperate and would be less useful. But the government didn’t mandate that iMessage had to be compatible with SMS (even though it is somewhat) nor did they mandate that AirDrop had to interoperate with a standard. Should the government also mandate a standard messaging protocol must be used or that it has to work with SMS? S…
Wait, are there places in the EU where is SMS is still that popular?
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It's not an analogy, it's a general principle: we put a standard in place in important industries with mature technology. Your car has a standard interface to a petrol pump. Fire engine has a standard interface to a fire hydrant. Some people believe it's time for a standard interface between a phone and a charger.
Those are all examples the market would solve really well. If some car manufacturer were to release a car that cannot be filled up at a regular petrol pump, nobody would buy the car. Those isn't happening with phones because clearly not enough people care.
Fire engines? No.
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We don’t have to reach for other industries. Electricity in the home is definitely “mature” yet we never saw the need for the government to mandate a standard for a plug on the device end.
The "other end" almost always has IEC connectors in Europe. Is this not the case in your country? If there's no regulation enforcing this, it's because the EU doesn't think it's necessary — the industry has agreed upon a standard without intervention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320
Which is exactly what the EU asked them to do with chargers, 15 years ago :) And then they didn't so here's the resolution.