541–550 of 1001 posts
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Government mandates on how you can charge your phone won't stifle innovation?
What exactly is genuinely innovative about the iPhone connector at this point? It's 10 years old, and the only selling point I can see it having over USB (even when it was new) was the rotational symmetry (which is now also possible with USB C, which is what's being mandated).
most annoying.
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This is not the reason. The reason is, the last time they changed ports (from 30pin to lightning) it created huge blowback from consumers who had lots of 30pin accessories that were no longer compatible, and even though lightning is FAR better people don’t like switching. USB-C is not much different than lightning for charging / connecting a phone, so the blowback from consumers will be huge when all their accessorie…
Meanwhile apple switched the connector for both their laptop and their iPad. So clearly they aren't afraid of blowback.
Reality: Laws are the only way to civilise mankind.
I agree with the overall tone in the comments here: yay in general, but what a shame a law needs to specify a specific port for ~iPhones~ devices. I really like USB-C. It's sooo convenient to charge my notebook, my headphones, my phone, my everything with the same cable. However what bothers me since someone pointed it out to me: for phones, which are used all day in all kind of situations, lightning has a big andvan…
This really works for you? When I try charging my laptop with my phone cable/charger, it not only doesn't charge, but the laptop requires a hard reset to start turn on again. When I try charging my phone with my laptop cable/charger, it just doesn't charge. So while it's great in theory that everything is USB-C, it doesn't solve that much for me...
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Wait you think they somehow tried to compete with apple ? That's not how USB works.
If there is no better connector, why should the committee put any effort into developing anything better? Tech history, and human history in general, is littered with examples. Especially in the old Warsaw Pact states.
> why should the committee put any effort into developing anything better?
The EU is absolutely not in the business of developing any connector whatsoever. They wanted _a_ standard (for eco/market reasons), and asked the industry to create one. This became USB and the USB Forum. Now they make it mandatory to follow that standard. In the act they passed, the power to set the specific standard is deferred to the European Commission, to make it easier to update it if necessary. These are called delegated acts [0]. If a new physical connector is ever necessary, the USB forum will write the standard, ask the EU if they can update the reference, which is easy since it's only a matter of pushing paperwork. _Not_ hardcoding a feature like this, and following what industry wants is an explicit goal of the legislative process. It has worked extremely well in these sorts of circumstances. The only risk I could see is a technical innovation for connectors, which the USB Forum refuses to implement for some reason. This could happen, but I don't see it as being any different then current industry practices.
[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...
Why do people think it is a good thing to have this enforced by law is beyond me. I don't see any win besides a minor convenience. A lightning cable weighs almost nothing and it's not a big deal to have one around. As to lightning port limitations, I question whether usb-c will give average iPhone users any other advantage other than charging their phone. What are people gonna do with it other than charge their phone…
> I don't see any win besides a minor convenience. A lightning cable weighs almost nothing and it's not a big deal to have one around. The standardization is good for a lot of purposes: - cutting down on the number of cables and especially chargers. Seriously, it's amazing to have one single Anker 65W power supply and a single cable on vacation and it can charge everything - tablet, work phone, laptop, power bank, dr…
I have this now, except with 1 extra cable (which happens to charge my iPhone and AirPods).
> - if a cable gets lost or damaged, spare cables are cheap and plentiful, and they will also be available in a few years of time
Walk into any store or gas station today and you'll find all sorts of cable solutions for lightning. I was looking for a cable on vacation last year and had a harder time finding a usb-c to usb-c power cable. Everywhere had lightning though.
> - when devices break down, chargers still can live on.
Again, all my chargers have been usb-c for awhile.
Apple was clearly headed towards usb-c anyway, so I doubt this law changes much in their plans. But, a lot of the benefits were already there. Apple will need to include a lightning to usb-c dongle for a period of time as accessories shift over.
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Did the current cable used by the iPhone have this problem too? If not, isn't this changing it to the worse? edit to clarify: ... because while Apple might still include a working cable, but if you grab one of the 10 cables out of your cable box, you don't know if it will actually work.
No, Lightning was great because if you saw a lightning cable, you could plug it in and know exactly what it's going to do. USB-C has been an absolute fucking mess, half my cables don't charge half my devices with USB-C ports, and you have no idea from looking what a cable is supposed to do. Everything plugs into everything, but it's a completely different story if they'll actually interop how you want. I can't believ…
I have dollar store Lightning cables that only have pins on one side and only charge and don't do data.
Also Lightning cables suck because you know that literally none of them can even do even 1080p video.
EU knows best. Just look how well making everyone click to accept cookies worked out. And “empower consumers to make more sustainable choices“. typical gov speak. If I was Apple I’d build in a lightning to usb-c adapter to the bottom and add a chin to the phone that resembled the older Pixels and engrave on it EU mandated.
The fact that stupid website designers and even stupider web marketers want to collect useless information to the point that they have to have complicated cookie acceptance banners is not the EU's fault.
The GDPR forces system designers to actually work out how to deal with their customers saying "forget about me" and the regulations have the force of law and fines behind them.
It makes it much easier as a designer to say "No you can't collect random information and make a profile of the customer that we can sell to unrelated companies, because otherwise we'll get a huge fine."
LET'S GO EU! These headlines make me proud. Let's reach a global standard for charging stuff. I wish everything that had to be charged sometimes had a USB-C plug. But also I hope that the USB standard gets less messy in the future.
> Regardless of their manufacturer, all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops that are rechargeable via a wired cable, operating with a power delivery of up to 100 Watts, will have to be equipped with a USB Type-C port.