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

This was part of the EU Commission's 2020 work programme as one small sub-point among well over a hundred under one of the 43 main goals, as a secondary priority after a long list of climate and economic changes.

You're of course free to disagree with their prioritisation, but this has hardly been a major part of the Commissions work.

> The law will not take effect until 2024, and in the meantime the industry has largely moved toward USB-C / wireless charging.

Even with respect to mobile phones this excludes a certain notable holdout that accounts for a large proportion of the market, and which have kept resisting the EU push for over a decade, and a number of smaller holdouts still sticking with micro-USB.

But you'll note this extends way past phones, including to laptops where there's still a mess of different chargers.

With respect to wireless charging, it makes little difference as long as long as most people still have cables as backup (indeed I've yet to see someone use wireless charging; I'm sure a few more uses it at home, but I for one have zero devices capable of wireless charging; it will not reduce waste anytime soon)

I know for my own use, unnecessary cables and chargers still account for a large proportion of my electric waste because of the frequency of replacement, so for my part I welcome this.

Firewire was also a technical standard but never became widespread; if I recall, it was Apple's attempt to push against the converging industry standards with what they saw as a technically superior solution. But only Apple and Sony ever bet on Firewire in a big way.

If Lightning is never used in a master configuration, how come you can use it to plug headphone into an iPhone? It wouldn't have made "no sense" to put Lightning connectors on Macs (although I definitely agree it wouldn't have been wise and I'm glad they didn't).

MagSafe is another non-standard Mac thing -- which was replaced with USB-C and then came back again, very unusually for Apple.

So, they certainly haven't always have standard ports, and Apple have not always been consistent.

2. You don't need USB-C to have your device act as a host, whatever the marketing material might say. USB On-The-Go has been around for a long time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_On-The-Go The advantage of USB-C is that it gives you access to a wider market of third-party peripherals -- I'd say Apple saw the way the wind was blowing, and decided to sacrifice the control and fat margins you mentioned in favour of a better overall product.

Apple has only one goal in mind - their margins. Everything they do must be seen in function of that. It's clear Apple is going to remove every single port from the iPhone, they only have to find how.

I agree that they love a fat margin, and feel entitled to it, but I don't think that's quite the full story. Maybe I'm buying too much into the reality distortion field, but I think they genuinely believe they make better products due to their unique approach. That involves exercising strict control where they can (walled garden app store, proprietary connectors) and aggressively removing features that 10% of users rely on in order to give what they see as a better experience for the 90% (e.g. removing headphone jack); but sometimes also bending to market forces and embracing standards when they think it benefits users -- sometimes very early indeed. Think of the 2015 MacBook, which launched with just a single USB-C port for everything, when USB-C peripherals hadn't even become very widespread.

The test of all this will be whether iPhones continue using Lightning, or switch to USB-C. I'm very confident that they'll switch, in either the next revision or the one after.

It'll be a painful switch, but Apple is very good at powering through those (ADB to USB, 68K to PowerPC, removing floppy drive, removing CD drive, PowerPC to x86, 30-pin connector to Lightning, removing headphone jack, x86 to ARM). When they make up their mind to switch, they make it happen very quickly.

Were it not for standards and regulations you would have to buy different locks, lightbulbs, and charger adapters depending on the company which built your apartment. It's already annoying enough that these specifications change from one country to another, but it would be a complete nightmare if there were no interoperability regulations at all.

Also, more specifically about computing: the Internet being an open standard brought many advantages for innovation, compared to centralized networks such as MSN or AOL. As for hardware, i don't know about you but i'm pretty happy i can change my CPU/RAM/HDD with any socket-compatible product and i'm not tied to a single vendor... in fact i'm pretty angry when i find a machine where some parts are non-standard and cannot be easily replaced.

To be clear, i'm not saying there's no value in deviating from the standards for innovation. I'm just saying 99% of usecases are better addressed with standard solutions than with halfbaked proprietary "solutions".