Great until you have some "sales rep" in a supermarket dealing with a Karen who's device won't charge fast enough off a 10W USBC charger that fundamentally isn't the same as a 60W one.
That's not new to USB-C though, there was already a wide range of charging speeds on USB-A
Kind of is new when all of the specs rely on cable capability and not all manufacturers label different cables differently. The spec for what it is, is a mess, but it's a nice, nay, highly desirable form factor.
I'm not a citizen of the EU, so your various centrally-planned interventions in the world economy affect me without any possibility of representation. It leaves me hoping your economy becomes much smaller so Asia can start ignoring it. Or reform I guess, the vote is yours, not mine.
We all affect each other, a lot of American things have become de facto stands. Anyway, be careful what you wish because it might become real and you might find out that Asia is not the libertarian utopia.
If anything, Asia is generally more collectivist than Europe or the US.
You’re really ignoring the amount of inertia that a deployed fleet of cars creates. You can’t just change standards with the snap of a finger once there are 10M cars in the field with it, once that happens, you’re stuck with that standard for probably decades, as the downsides of changing it become much more acute than the potential upsides.
If the US comes up with the superior cables, EU will simply allow it be optional and the industry will retrofit as needed. Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around. Old building that definitely don't meet the modern requirements are everywhere. Besides, the states with Cable Freedom will also have all the obsolate cables when the industry finally comes up with the perfect cable.
> Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around.
So what's the problem with allowing lightning to exist, since as a standard it predated USB-C (and in fact was the impetus for the creation of the latter)? If we allow neighborhoods to keep their old power connectors without retrofit... why not allow lightning to continue to exist?
On the other hand, companies building wholly proprietary infrastructure is just pure e-waste on the back of the citizens of those countries that ALSO limits innovation. Imagine a world where Ford cars use a different gas nozzle from a GM product in the US. The average person would have to pick and choose stations and if one were to go out of business, the lesser standard would encounter mass disposal and retrofit, al…
We should also mandate the reduction of open source projects, after all there are too many competing standards. We don’t want code to be wasted now do we? Let’s start by banning the use of Tensorflow
That's just a dumb argument. Open source projects can just be forked with no monetary implications.
EU is a densely populated place where having multiple charging networks of incomparable plugs will be horrible. When you are not happy with decisions the governments make, it usually means that you should be involved in the process of making the decisions. Europeans don't trust that the industry will always come up with the best solutions for the user, Americans usually don't trust the government doing something well…
I'm not a citizen of the EU, so your various centrally-planned interventions in the world economy affect me without any possibility of representation. It leaves me hoping your economy becomes much smaller so Asia can start ignoring it. Or reform I guess, the vote is yours, not mine.
Would you happier if you were affected by European corporate actions instead?
We live in a global economy, you are constantly affected by things happening thousand of miles away (e.g. Ukraine invasion bumped the price of gas across the world). Not sure why you're conflating that with the fact that these actions are "centrally-planned".
A lot of people saying "USB-C cables aren't even compatible with each other!" (Nintendo switch etc.) Guess what: that's exactly the problem this regulation is intended to solve. Fake USB-C cables like Nintendo's that have the right shape but do not adhere to spec should gradually disappear along with lightning cables. The regulation actually says that cables can no longer be bundled with the devices themselves, so Ni…
I think this is a stupid thing. Repurposing a commonly used connector for other things to reuse cheap connectors and cables is something that is usually done in the electronic industry (e.g. my oscilloscope use an HDMI socket for the logic analyzer input, you have plenty of lines and the connector is cheap and good). It's not uncommon to design a board and use type-C only for power (5V input, without the circuitry to…
A lot of people saying "USB-C cables aren't even compatible with each other!" (Nintendo switch etc.) Guess what: that's exactly the problem this regulation is intended to solve. Fake USB-C cables like Nintendo's that have the right shape but do not adhere to spec should gradually disappear along with lightning cables. The regulation actually says that cables can no longer be bundled with the devices themselves, so Ni…
No it's not fine, this is just another coercion and consolidation of power where it shouldn't belong. Independent entities cannot innovate on their own because now there's a central apparatus that decides what should be innovated and how, with all the inherent political power struggles of big players, good luck.
EU should be there to set goals, not to dictate implementation.
A lot of people saying "USB-C cables aren't even compatible with each other!" (Nintendo switch etc.) Guess what: that's exactly the problem this regulation is intended to solve. Fake USB-C cables like Nintendo's that have the right shape but do not adhere to spec should gradually disappear along with lightning cables. The regulation actually says that cables can no longer be bundled with the devices themselves, so Ni…
I don't see why "What about innovation?" is taken seriously as an argument anyway. USB-C is more than adequate, we could coast with it for the next hundred years. Nobody is kept up at night by the lack of innovation in AC power plugs, the standards countries have settled on today, while not all equivalent, are all generally satisfactory in practice. Problem solved; stop fixing that which ain't broke and move on to ot…
>Gates himself has strenuously denied making the comment. In a newspaper column that he wrote in the mid-1990s, Gates responded to a student's question about the quote: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." Later in the column, he added, "I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
I don't see why "What about innovation?" is taken seriously as an argument anyway. USB-C is more than adequate, we could coast with it for the next hundred years. Nobody is kept up at night by the lack of innovation in AC power plugs, the standards countries have settled on today, while not all equivalent, are all generally satisfactory in practice. Problem solved; stop fixing that which ain't broke and move on to ot…
This argument would sound less hollow if there weren’t two existing superior (from a user experience perspective) alternatives already on the market. Apple’s Lightning (thinner than USB-C) and MagSafe (safer than USB-C for charging laptops… so glad Apple is transitioning back to it for M2 Airs)
I used both Lightning and USB-C cables, I had two Lightning cables dying from oxidation (not misuse in water or anything, normal use) and not a single USB-C problem so far.
Calling Lightning superior is blatant Apple fanboyism.
PC and x86 took us pretty far... And that was mostly carried on interoperability... I doubt we would have gotten to technology being as ubiquitous as it is without it.
Also, the internet itself.
Funny enough, France's failed internet, the Minitel would probably be the solution pushed today by the EU.
The Internet won on the free market, through its own merits. No politician intervention necessary. Even if plenty tried to capture the glory (information superhighway…)