611–620 of 751 posts
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or $0.70 per year at current energy prices.
Germany: hold my beer! 1.78€ or $2.09 But thats not point here. Everyone is talking about the climate change and then we want to charge millions or billions of phones with ~50% extra power? Good idea!
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I don’t think anyone is objecting to the motives of the legislation, but rather that it’s unconventional for governments to directly stipulate a technology. Typically they set some parameters that their subjects must comply with. For example, they usually say something like “cars may not emit more than X PPM of carbon monoxide per liter of fuel” rather than “cars shall use technology Y”. It’s not that speculating a t…
They tried the light-touch approach for years (i.e. the previous rulings), and it has improved things but Apple insists in, basically, respecting only the letter of the law and not the spirit - and they are a third of the market. So this time, the Commission came up with a stricter approach. > it’s an order of magnitude more difficult to change that legislation The previous attempt is from 2009. A review every 10-15…
Are you sure about that?
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The proposed law is not about convenience for the user but about reducing waste. Also, you don’t need to carry around a wireless charger, you leave the charger at home and charge your phone overnight.
That's the theory with all charging, isn't it? But I'm talking about while travelling or all those unexpected circumstances when you find yourself needing a charge when you're not at home. One night recently, I managed to get locked out of my flat, after midnight, with nothing but my phone in my pocket. On about 15% charge! Thankfully that was enough to book a hotel and buy a lightning cable (and a toothbrush) at a 2…
I have seen them in many commuter trains and most coffee shops, like Starbucks. They're surprisingly common if you know to look out for the symbol.
Good, though in practice it's not the charger the problem, I use the same USB plug everywhere, it's Apple and their cable. Right now I always need with me a micro USB cable, an USB-C one, and Lightning, because Apple thinks different™. What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones? I can think of 3 reasons: 1. A lightning port is slightly smaller than USB-c, so it enable Apple to keep their phone slimmer than the competition in theory. 2. Apple loves to be in control of everything. With lightning, they could make a switch to a "lightning 2.O" cable / port whenever they so pleased. With USB-C they would be restricte…
The lightning cable is not required for the MFi program, you can certify lots of things for MFi. Not sure why they couldn't expand the program to USB-C cables. They might do it already, honestly.
There are two ways how to handle this. 1) legislation forces a standard upon every device maker. Because technology advances all the time legislation will have to change the port every ~10 years. This might happen or not, potentially forcing device makers into building obsolete tech into their devices. 2) make a law which forces device makers to hold regular meetings/whatever to decide upon themselves which port they…
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One nice and welcome example of consumer-friendly legislation, btw: The EU prohibited mobile operators from charging voice and data roaming fees within the EU. So, now on holiday in Spain, say, you can just keep using your mobile contract including free minutes and data. (A typical deal is 10 GB data.) When traveling outside the EU, it's still best to buy a local SIM to avoid the ludicrous roaming charges, but there'…
Legislating pricing is something governments can do well. Legislating physical interconnect is an area where they are much more likely to be ignorant of the relevant requirements. I, for one, vastly prefer Lightning to USB-C despite the interoperability; I hope that if the EU goes down this road that Apple makes a Lightning phone for the rest of us.
Why do you prefer Lightning over USB-C ?
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> Nobody forces you to buy a consumer-unfriendly product that also happens to be arbitrarily expensive. If anything, Apple's Lightning port (and the 30-pin connector before that) are significantly more consumer-friendly than USB. Where consumers are consumers of Apple products, but still. In the span of time when Apple only had two connectors, USB went through 3 or 4. USB didn't even have a charging standard until 20…
A single, monopolistic market would also be "consumer friendly", given those parameters. Obviously we don't want that, do we? Getting multiple manufacturers to agree on anything is always going to be a challenge and produce some compromises. But it's still better for the market as a whole, which in turn is better for consumers. I look forward to the chance of buying a single, universal charger with great features tha…
I really highly doubt about the decades part. I also highly doubt about the "single charger with great features" because USB has so many optional parts that many manufacturers are unlikely to implement.
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You can break anything if you try hard enough. I make no claims of lightning being indestructible, but USB-C is genuinely fragile.
I plug USB-C cable into my iPad and MBP more than I do to my boyfriend... so yours is only an anecdote of perhaps badly manufacture devices.
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This is a very popular industry standard with a well known path for updates – it seems pretty reasonable for the government to simply tell the stragglers to adopt it. Unlike the concrete in your example compatibility is a bigger concern - imagine if you needed special shoes to walk on AppleCrete - and the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern.
> the service lifetime is much shorter so waste is a very reasonable concern Lightning has been around quite a while no? So waste wise Apple isn’t doing too bad.
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The fact is Lightning is so widely used in practice that force deprecating it would drive an awful lot of kit into land fills. If it was one of the dozen or so variations of little USB with 2% or 3% market share each you'd have a point, but those have mostly gone already. I don't expect Lightning to be around forever, but then I don't expect USB-C to be around forever either. Some day it will be super-ceded - should…
Apple could make an iPhone for a few years with usb-C and lightning if they wanted people to be able to use their existing gear, but that doesn't feel very Apple: their laptops jumped right from zero USB-C to zero ports that aren't USB-C. They might also get some new customers; I was considering an iPhone rather than Android in my last phone purchasing round, but no USB-C means I need different charging, means I don'…