I'm all for stopping Apple,Sony, or other nasty megacorps from including deliberately 'unique' cables that cost a fortune to replace -- but when the bureaucrats get involved in anything, particularily technology, it frequently ends up being a disaster. This is for a few reasons not the least of which is that the types who are in government are not the types who can make anything useful let alone novel. Even worse the types who influence government are also mostly useless except for their ability to influence government.
EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
311–320 of 1001 posts
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
You need to distinguish design trends from what the regulation enforced.
The most obvious examples that come to mind:
- Small cars aren't that small anymore to stop them from being blatant death traps.
- A lot of the edges have been smoothed and curved to make impact with pedestrians less deadly (also killed pop-up lights and hood ornaments, which is kinda funny considering the Mercedes Benz hood ornament was sometimes jokingly described as a sight to aim for pedestrians)
- Thick A pillars due to crash tests regulations
While I can blame these for killing out novel or even trademark features of some vehicles lineups, I don't think alone they made everyone homogenize their design, it's just what the industry eventually converged on by themselves.
Look at phones, there's no regulation on what a phone should look like, yet today phones are just a fancy screen, nothing like the incredible variety that Nokia alone sported back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if Apple finally comes out with wired mag safe for the iPhone? Does they count as wireless? Or would it be illegal in Europe because a wire was still involved even if the connection was magnetic?
USBC can be made to be "MagSafe". When Apple only sold laptops with USB-C ports there were a bunch of MagSafe knockoffs sold for laptops. Although most of the time they would break eventually but it's not impossible. If it just was a special cord as long as you could use a regular USBC cord it seems like it would be compliant but IANAL.
Those solutions aren’t very good, so I doubt Apple would go that route.
Frankly, I’m expecting the lightning port to be replaced with a purely inductive/magnetic solution eventually, there probably will not even be a receptacle for it, just a wireless contact to the phone from the wire like how the Apple Watch can only charged.
I’m guessing in that case, they would be exempt from providing a usb-c port since the phones would be technically purely wireless by that point. At that point, other vendors will follow and the EU will mandate Qi as the standard wireless charging solution since the USB-C mandate will be obsolete.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#314By 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…
> Will EU block innovation? Innovation is overrated. And standardising is not blocking. What we need more urgently than innovation is to stop creating so much waste, extracting so much stuff from the earth, and in general reduce consumption. Standardisation accomplishes at least some of that.
Are really the non-standard cables to blame here?
How about non-removable batteries and unrepairable phones? Many phones would be still ok, but the non-removable (cheaply) battery means that they get replaced prematurely, because the cost of replacement is overlapping the price of a low/mid tear phones. Back in the day, you pulled the back cover off, put a new batter in, and the phone was as good as new. Same with other types of repair, especially the kinds where manufacturer just replaces the whole assembly just because of one small part malfunctioning.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#315Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not correct so far as I can tell -- the amendment to directive 2014/53/EU [1] says > Hand-held mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, in so far as they are capable of being recharged via wired charging, shall: > (a) be equipped with the USB Type-C receptacle, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-3:2021 ‘Universal serial bus inte…
Well they asked everyone to agree on a standard 10 years ago, but that didn't happen (just because of Apple). So now they forcefully decided.
This is the truth of the matter. Apple has been dragging their feet on switching away from lightning.
Why? No idea. It's a much slower standard, and puts the wearing parts in the port instead of the cable. USB-C is designed by committee, sure, but the port itself is better than lightning in nearly every consumer metric there is.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#316What 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...
MagSafe is back on new models, and Lightning is physically thinner than USB-C.
> Lightning is physically thinner than USB-C.
The thinnest smartphones on the market currently are all USB-C phones so that does not really seem to be an issue. These are a good 2mm thinner then the thinnest iPhone ever made.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Will EU block innovation? It already has. Tesla's connector is nicer (you can call that subjective but it isn't) and the supercharging network in the US is deploying the clunky standard sort of connector as well. If EU legislation were universal, that would preclude any future where the superior connector is licensed and takes over from the crappy designed-by-committee alternative, because Tesla would be forced to…
> Legislators deciding who gets to be VHS and who has to be Betamax is bad, actually. They didn't make the decision. It's more like legislators observing that Betamax is failing and deciding that it's in everyone's best interests to tell Sony that they have to adopt VHS instead of creating confusion in the marketplace. > Tesla's connector is nicer Tesla's system only goes up to 400 volts. CCS goes up to 800 volts. Th…
CCS spec limits are actually 1000V and 500A. Electrify America uses 350A units, hence the 350 kW chargers (1000V x 350A). Lucid battery packs are 924V to maximize CCS capability.
DC Fast charging has to match pack voltage, so with 400ish volt pack voltage Tesla gets big charging speed by providing extreme amperage. CCS is limited to 500A, so the best way to provide really fast charging is higher pack voltages.
Higher voltage does have some benefits around heat and losses, but also has downsides like cost of electronics and installations over 600V generally require special electrical licensing.
It's hard to deny the tesla connector is a lot nicer to work with (especially V3 with thin, liquid cooled cables), but I still wish my model 3 sr+ had CCS like euro cars. I'd love to be able to have more charging options.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#318By 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…
It would be nice if we could limit new standards to once every 5-10 years. At which time people can submit new ideas for standardization approval and then the best one gets picked and everyone is required to switch. Backwards compatibility would probably score a lot of points.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#319Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 d…
Are you telling me there has been other "USB" cables before? No, USB-C came down from the heavens in the dawn of time and evil Apple has been using their evil proprietary lighting all this time, just out of spite to anger Android fanboys.
Re: EU reaches deal to make USB-C a common charger for most electronic devices
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Will EU block innovation? Innovation is overrated. And standardising is not blocking. What we need more urgently than innovation is to stop creating so much waste, extracting so much stuff from the earth, and in general reduce consumption. Standardisation accomplishes at least some of that.
> Innovation is overrated. And standardising is not blocking. Hard disagree? Both lightning and USB C were massive improvements in durability compared to Micro USB - I'd argue lightning is still better in that regard, because there's no thin piece inside the phone that can break (did phone repair, and 99% of the time a "broken" iphone port was just stuck lint). USB C is not universally better then then Micro, namely…
Granted this isn't the fault of the connector, but USB-C is certainly a mess. My Nintendo Switch uses USB-C charging, but I can't use my MacBook charger for it. There are different cables, ratings, etc. "make everything USB-C" is asking for confusion. As much as I hate having a different cable for every device, at least when I pick up a (Apple-branded) lightning cable, I know it will work correctly for my iPhone.