Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

engadget.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 1001 posts

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#181

Post by kasey_junk »

thinkindie wrote: post #134

What I don't understand from Apple - they have already made the move to USB-C with laptops (ditching the Magsafe - that was way more practical than the USB-C connector), why resisting this much for the iPhone/iPad/etc? I understand that they have additional revenue streams by licensing lighting to accessories manufactures, but still...

As a consumer I much prefer lightning to usbc. And would prefer apple open it.

That said it’s moot. I’ve got a mix of everything in my house and some of it won’t be upgraded for a very long time.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#182

Post by seydor »

ubermonkey wrote: post #130

It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design. I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice. Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own…

> USB or Lightning

This problem

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#183

Post by criddell »

RandomWorker wrote: post #152
ubermonkey wrote: post #130

It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design. I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice. Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own…

That was the whole point of USB —- it’s in the name Universal Serial Bus. We have to talk about the ewaste issue, which is massive score on the earth. The particular village in China where all our waste get recycled is just a horrible scene. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_waste_in_Guiyu This is a small step, but standardization is a great thing towards less waste.

USB is universal, but there are so many variations that it's not very clear.

Does the EU mandate say which USB-C modes and variations have to be supported?

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#184

Post by dingleberry420 »

ubermonkey wrote: post #130

It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design. I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice. Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own…

> What problem is the EU solving here?

Everything works together, except Apple stuff.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#185

Post by est31 »

akmarinov wrote: post #129
est31 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For cars, changes like these are phased in multiple steps. For each car model, companies mass producing cars have to obtain a permit for the model. Then, they are allowed to sell those cars. At which point the individual owners get their cars registered at the government office. The phasing in happens by first requiring it for permits for new models. The manufacturers can still build and sell older models. A few year…

Apple sells 50 million out of 250 million phones in the EU. Imagine if their revenue drops by 20%...

With your numbers, that'd be 4% relative to the entire market, which is definitely something that Apple and the other phone manufacturers can deal with.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#186

Post by tzs »

> “Today we have made the common charger a reality in Europe!” said the European Parliament’s rapporteur Alex Agius Saliba in a press statement. “European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device. Now they will be able to use a single charger for all their portable electronics.”

The devices this covers, those rechargeable by a wired cable according to the EU press release, have pretty much all used USB chargers for a long time so I don't see how this addresses the issue of multiple chargers piling up. At most it addresses the issue of multiple USB to X cables piling up, where X is most commonly Lightning.

Unless they also prohibit selling devices with USB chargers I have doubts that this will stop the bundling. Apple has tried to stop including chargers on the theory that nearly everyone already has a bunch lying around, and has drawn a lot of complaints over that, and fines in Brazil where the government regulators have decided that not bundling chargers with every phone is anti-consumer.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#187

Post by Majestic121 »

D13Fd wrote: post #109
lekevicius wrote: post #14

As a European, I'm very happy. USB-A has been with us for over 20 years. It's only disappearing because of USB-C, and USB-C seems to have room to grow. I wouldn't be surprised if it will still be the most popular connector in 2035, and not just because "legislation stops innovation". Making sure there are no weird exceptions to a very good port is reasonable and good.

It does stop innovation in things like lightning and MagSafe. And it doesn’t fix the multiple charger issue either, because so many manufacturers don’t adhere to the USB-C standard that any combination of charger + cable + device has an unreasonably non-zero chance of not working or even damaging the device. So in the end we still have to have multiple chargers, but now we can roll the dice on which one works with or…

It does not stop innovation like MagSafe : https://www.amazon.com/Magnetic-Adapter-Connector-Transfer-C...

I'm not sure what you mean by 'unreasonably non-zero', but I've been sharing chargers between Macbook, XPS 13 and Thinkpad with no concern, + a charger from amazon.

Some charger are less powerful than others, so charge is not always as quick, but in real life it does not matter : it's still charging fast enough in any combination, and for the last year the only reason I have multiple chargers is to have one at home and one at work, but any laptop works well on all chargers.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#188

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

Hamcha wrote: post #173
ubermonkey wrote: post #130

It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design. I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice. Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own…

It's not a new thing. Car design has been dictated by regulations for decades and while I'm sure it has definitely stopped some novel designs from getting out there, I think we can be mostly thankful that we don't live in a sea of heterogeneous (let alone hazardous) designs. Cars can still look cool, but not to the point of being a detriment. USB-C is a pretty lax standard (for good and bad) and at the end of the day…

> Cars can still look cool

compare cars from 40s-70s to what came after, its a different world

you can argue it was worth it, but you can’t argue cars didn’t get homogeneous and boring in the process

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#189

Post by rootusrootus »

dhzhzjsbevs wrote: post #140
ubermonkey wrote: post #130

It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design. I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice. Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own…

Apples racketeering and monopolistic behavior? I think this is a step over the line for regulators but so is apples behavior for the last decade or two when it comes to repairability. Fuck em.

> Apples racketeering and monopolistic behavior?

That's a bit over the top, don't you think? When Apple created the Lightning connector, the accepted alternative was micro-USB. And micro-USB is terrible, awful, no-good, crap. Many millions of people are happy Lightning existed to bridge the time before the rest of the world could design a slightly better small USB connector. Which, of course, might still not be as durable as Lightning, but it's good enough.

Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices

#190

Post by jeroenhd »

mrtksn wrote: post #123

By the way, that's also how Tesla and all other cars have the same electric plug in EU(not the USB mandate but the car plug standardisation mandate). Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is what happens if better solutions are found. Will EU block innovation? That question is addressed in the Q&A: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/QANDA_... In essence, they seem to believe that wired char…

In the USA all modern electric cars also use the normal standard, except for Tesla. There were a few early offshoots and Tesla had good reason to come up with their own connector initially (no other plug could transfer that much power!) but these days everything has been pretty much consolidated.

For charging your car at Tesla chargers that haven't been upgraded to the standard yet there are adaptors available from Tesla plugs to standard fast charging plugs.

Older cars may need their weird custom connections but everything else has been pretty much been standardised. I don't know how much the EU decision has affected this, but it's not an EU exclusive feat.

Post reply on HN