511–520 of 751 posts
Is the EU going to restrict innovation and prevent another USB connector from being developed?
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I find it interesting that our main hope for forcing the big tech to follow ethical/environment_friendly/user_friendly procedures is not the US, but the EU. I'm not European, but can anyone tell me how does the political system in the EU let (or even motivate) law-makers and governments to support such mandates and laws that are in favor of consumers?
I'm not an expert by any means, but my impression is that, while they certainly still have some influence, lobbyists and big companies hold a lot less sway in European politics than in the US. Part of that may be tighter rules around campaign finance, part of it may be cultural.
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I feel like it’s an overstep too. I don’t feel comfortable with bureaucrats determining which technology we should use. Going to stick my neck out, and some might say this is just a slippery slope fallacy, but should governments mandate choice of programming languages? It would certainly help interoperability and longevity of code - just like with connectors. Anyway on an emotion level it just feels wrong.
There's a problem - waste and people aren't solving it. So the government is trying.
It would be like building codes mandating the use of a very specific concrete mix instead of mandating that supporting members must be able to handle total expected load with a safety factor of 5 or something - I’m not a civil engineer.
Does anyone feel it is a little strange to have a government entity mandating a physical interconnect? I guess it has worked out well enough for receptacles. But on a phone it acts as a data connection as well. I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location? No one is using it anymore, but it is still mandatory on everything.
No, I don't. Here the EU is creating legislation that forces manufacturers to increase interoperability, be more consumer-friendly, and more climate friendly. This all seems within the remit of governments to me. > I guess I just wonder if in 20 years will every device still have a USB-C port on it in some odd location? No one is using it anymore, but it is still mandatory on everything. Or course not, it's not like…
Regulations can be changed, but its not easy.
If this regulation was proposed in 2005, would we even have usb-c? or would the mobile world still be stuck on mini-usb because that is what the EU would have mandated at that time?
I don't want my cell phone designed by an EU committee.
Considering lightning has been around for longer than any of the USB variants (mini, micro and USB-C, approx 7 years each), this makes no sense. Is the EU going to restrict innovation and prevent another USB connector from being developed?
The article focuses on forcing USB-C ports (popular), but the proposal also unbundles chargers from products like cell phones (unpopular). Apple and several other vendors already unbundled chargers from their boxes with mixed reception. Will be interesting to see how this proposal is received when people realize it means they’ll be purchasing chargers separately.
It's just a shift in framing. To use a silly example, you don't expect a phone to ship with a generator: an electricity hookup is a general piece of infrastructure that a user can be expected to have.
In a world full of mandated USB-C-compatible devices, having a single commodity cable slots much more cleanly into "infra you're expected to have already" than "hidden tax on buying a new phone" (Apple's strategy)
From the announcement https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_21_... (linked in article) > Today, the Commission is proposing: > A harmonised charging port for electronic devices: USB-C will be the common port. > Harmonised fast charging technology will help prevent that different producers unjustifiably limit the charging speed and will help to ensure that charging speed is the same when using any c…
Wait, they want to have USB-C ports on plug chargers? Guess I'm getting a bunch of USB-C to USB-A adapters to plug in my USB-A to USB-C cables.. :\
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That's the opposite of compliance. Not only they didn't get to change their own product to match some standard, they went straight against the spirit of the law (add more electronics and yet-another source of waste).
It was still considered a success because it at least reduced the need for proprietary AC adapters. Now it seems they want to expand on that to fix the proprietary cable/dongle issue too.
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Wait isn't unbundling the sale of the charger the thing everyone got mad at Apple for? And now they are legislating it?
Apple's charger unbundling was stupid. They sold the iPhone with a USB-A charging brick for like 12 years. Then when the iPhone 11 came out in 2019, it came with a USB-C charging brick and a USB-C to Lightning cable, which would not work with any of the chargers they bundled for the past decade and some. And then, one year after changing the cable, they took away the USB-C charging brick. "Just use the ones you alrea…
1) Manufacturers don't use USB-C in some cases because it takes up a lot of space. The point being, you can't dictate at this level of design.
2) 'Connectors' are like 'sraws' - they don't take up landfill. They are negligible waste item.
These are things that legislators think of 'because it's in front of them' i.e. they literally see these things every day, instead of thinking more deliberately about both waste and products.
1) Requirement to use a 'standard connector' would be appropriate, but they all do now. Or rather, lightning is not standard, the EU could encourage the open sourcing of it.
2) Some efforts to recycle all electronics would be interesting as well. Cords could be sold with a $1 'recycle markup' that goes to the recycler or something like that - this, along with other bits of operational impetus, might make an appreciable dent.