EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones • Hacker News Board

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#551

Post by msie » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:49 PM UTC

PedroBatista wrote: post #210

taf2 wrote: post #118

What happens when there is a better USB-C plug - isn't there a concern that locking into the current standard means in 50 years the EU is still stuck. I imagine we're in uncharted territory given in less then my lifetime USB was invented and has gone through at least 14 iterations e.g. it's been changing very fast. Unfortunately I fear even asking this question probably angers some, but I think it's an interesting qu…

When a better USB-C plug happens, the standards will get updated, instead of millions of people having to buy 10 versions of a damn plug NOW. It's not like the EU standardizes emergent and rapidly evolving things, it's a freaking plug and "stuck in the past" isn't exactly how I describe the EU.

No one is buying 10 versions of a damn plug. Only a gadget enthusiast who changes their phone type every year would see that problem. If you stick to Android there is one plug. If you stick to iPhone there is one plug.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#552

Post by revelio » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:52 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #546

revelio wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

It'd be so much better... for Pfizer to sell to consumers individually for 10-100x the price!

The Commission staff who signed these contracts are clearly idiots. Why do you assume they aren't paying 10x what the natural market rate would have been? Pfizer realized the EU would sign literally anything to be able to say it was going to save the day by purchasing vaccines. That's the absolute perfect time to set prices well above what you normally could charge!

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#553

Post by msie » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

trollied wrote: post #495

WanderPanda wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it’s the opposite, it ashames me to be an EU citizen. The problem with the EU is that it forces this kind of stuff on everyone instead of letting countries compete for the best policies. There is little/no feedback control hence it will drift down the usual decline of increasingly authoritarian systems. It‘s a shame because of the opportunity costs.

You must be young & not remember the huge mess that charging was in the early 2000s. Every single brand had a proprietary charging port/connector - same with their data connectors. These days it’s bliss in comparison. They more often than not were also hard wired into the electrical plug, making matters even worse (and power bricks weren’t solid state, they were cooper transformers, which were heavy!).

Yes it's better now and you didn't need legislation to force it.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#554

Post by avar » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

delecti wrote: post #530

avar wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can imagine that micro-USB got standardized in 2015, so in anticipation of that the first USB-C phone I bought that year came with micro-USB instead. The law would then have been reassessed in 2020, at which point some EU bureaucrats would have had to weigh "reversible connector" etc. on one hand, and "take the career fall for forcing half a billion people to buy new chargers" on the other. I'm pretty sure that in…

If the law had been passed in 2015, they probably would have picked USB-C as the newly finalized, and increasingly adopted, standard. Micro had already started to show its flaws by that point. Also, it's not like everyone in the EU needs to buy a new charger overnight; plenty of people would have a while before their next replacement, and plenty of others would have already gotten some other peripheral with the new p…

I can buy that, but I also think that we're now much less likely to replace USB-C, even if the reasons to do so in the future are just as compelling as the reasons for migrating away from micro.

Actually, I think (but I'm no lawyer) that if the USB-IF wants to standardize a new connector, they'd want to call it USB-C v2.0.

The law seems to implicitly defer to them to define "USB-C". If the consortium wants a new standard they could either reuse the name, or wait 2.5 years on average for EU approval or rejection.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#555

Post by mort96 » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:54 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #503

lelanthran wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what exactly is his "warning" about? Not sure about this particular one, but in general, this sort of warning is along the lines of "If you continue expending effort in subverting the spirit of the law, we shall tighten the regulations to such an extent that it will hurt you" . The world and their dog knew what the goal of the regulations were: if the goal is not met because "Apple has a lot of lawyers and presu…

Then it's very childish. It's the responsibility of legislators and regulators to be clear and precise -- to mean what they say and say what they mean. To "punish" a company for following a law, because of something the law doesn't actually say, is not what rule of law means, and would be a shameful thing. No company should have to intuit or guess what the government "really" meant, over and above what the law actual…

Clarifying what the spirit of the law isn't "childish". Law isn't software. Judges always take the spirit of the law into account when making decisions, and precedence is as important as the actual written text. This is true in both the US and the EU.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#556

Post by crazygringo » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:56 PM UTC

gtirloni wrote: post #543

crazygringo wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then it's very childish. It's the responsibility of legislators and regulators to be clear and precise -- to mean what they say and say what they mean. To "punish" a company for following a law, because of something the law doesn't actually say, is not what rule of law means, and would be a shameful thing. No company should have to intuit or guess what the government "really" meant, over and above what the law actual…

All laws have corner cases that are not covered. All laws. If laws were to cover every imaginable situation, they would be huge. Some already are... you have a whole bureaucracy working to understand them. That's why you often hear about the "spirit of the law" where humans know pretty well what the legislator is trying to accomplish, even though it's not fully codified in subsequent rules.

This is simply not true. Laws can be written exceptionally clearly, and very often are.

And the "spirit of the law" is a fallacy, which your sentence exposes when you write:

> "the legislator is trying to accomplish"

Because yes, there is absolutely intent with a single legislator. But there is no such thing as intent or spirit for a legislature (or committee). A legislature can pass a law, say 51 to 49, where every one of the 51 majority legislators has a different intent for passing it. And this isn't even the exception, it's the norm -- laws are hashed out in subcommittees as inelegant compromises because each legislator wants a different thing out of it.

Legislation that gets passed has no "intent" and no, humans don't know "pretty well" what was trying to be accomplished, because it's a compromise between competing wings/individuals of a party or coalition, and the only "intent" that they could decide on was what got written in the law, and nothing else.

Again, the "spirit of the law" is a fallacy. It's an illusion people would like to believe, but it doesn't exist.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#557

Post by jzb » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:57 PM UTC

sharedbeans wrote: post #387

jzb wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the whole world adopted this stance maybe I wouldn’t an overflowing box of useless, obsolete cables. Maybe I wouldn’t need separate chargers and cables for my phone, tablet, ebook reader, and other assorted devices. The amount of waste produced because companies are incentivized to produce incompatible devices like charger cables is staggering. The additional cost burden on users is unnecessary. The theoretical be…

Can you help me understand what you're saying? It comes off as so over the top that I find it absurd, but maybe we just have different backgrounds/experience. 1) Companies are not incentivized to produce incompatible cables, the industry has done a remarkably good job of settling on basically a single standard, so the incentives seem to run counter to what you say. The major hold out introduced their own cable standa…

"Companies are not incentivized to produce incompatible cables, the industry has done a remarkably good job of settling on basically a single standard"

If constrained to cell phones and tablets only I might sort-of agree with you, but right now the rest of the industry is fragmented to the point that it's not advantageous for any vendor to have its own weird cable except for Apple.

Even still, laptops can charge and dock via USB-C but they still often have their own weird-ass connectors and chargers.

But this also ignores the pre-Android years of every cell phone manufacturer having their own chargers, etc.

"Would the amount of charging cables you have purchased in your lifetime even fill up one regular-sized (13 gallon-ish) trash bag?"

If we're only talking about cell phones, close but no. But if we include similar devices that have used similar chargers and now use USB-C (ebook readers, MP3 players, tablets, handheld gaming devices) then yes. Easily.

Starting in the late 90s, I've owned something like 15 cell phones, and I think ~10 of them had unique chargers. Several MP3 players starting with the Creative Nomad and ending with a Fiio X5 (I think? I lost it on a plane). Three or four handheld gaming devices including a Sony PSP, IIRC.

And that doesn't include things like smart speakers (Amazon Echo devices now use USB-C I think? But the first few didn't), and a slew of other devices that could've used the prevailing standard (USB micro or mini or now USB-C) but didn't.

And that doesn't even include the parade of assorted data connection cables...

And, finally, that is only my personal use. I have a family, so when I say a "staggering" amount of waste I'm taking into account all of the various unique and now dead-end devices/connectors/cables that my wife and kids have churned through.

So - would I trade the potential for innovation on the off chance someone is going to come up with a super-duper nifty new cable vs. having a legislated standard? Yep. Happily.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#558

Post by ianburrell » Sun, May 07, 2023, 4:58 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #57

devinprater wrote: post #42

Lol and a lot of Apple's charging cables are Lightning to USB C now. I can't wait to get a USB C iPhone. All my stuff is USB C, from my Braille display to my game controllers. It'll make things so much easier to only need one kind of cable for everything.

I learned about an interesting corner case last week: devices that use USB-C physical connectors but have USB 2.0 PHY. You can get away with a much longer cable at that lower Baud rate, but that cable likely won't work for most USB-C devices.

Most USB-C devices and cables are USB2. Most USB-C phones are USB2, and there are a lot more phones than there are laptops with USB3 USB-C.

It is probably better to think of USB3 as extension that requires special, shorter cables. I like to think of them as charging cables and data cables.

I probably have two USB3 USB-C cables for MacBooks (and I found one that is 6ft long) and dozen USB2 USB-C cables for charging phones and MacBooks.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#559

Post by AYBABTME » Sun, May 07, 2023, 5:02 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #503

lelanthran wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what exactly is his "warning" about? Not sure about this particular one, but in general, this sort of warning is along the lines of "If you continue expending effort in subverting the spirit of the law, we shall tighten the regulations to such an extent that it will hurt you" . The world and their dog knew what the goal of the regulations were: if the goal is not met because "Apple has a lot of lawyers and presu…

Then it's very childish. It's the responsibility of legislators and regulators to be clear and precise -- to mean what they say and say what they mean. To "punish" a company for following a law, because of something the law doesn't actually say, is not what rule of law means, and would be a shameful thing. No company should have to intuit or guess what the government "really" meant, over and above what the law actual…

This depends on the legal system. Not all legal systems are like the US, some have different burdens and put those burdens on different parties.

Re: EU sends Apple stark warning over USB-C charging on new iPhones

#560

Post by 13of40 » Sun, May 07, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

baq wrote: post #544

aetherson wrote: post #477

I think Apple should just make USB-C the norm for iPhones. But the idea that a trans-national government over 750M people should be trying to regulate in this level of detail is just obviously a recipe for disaster. For every one time they successfully push a company to do something correct -- but ultimately trivial, like this thing -- there are going to be 10 cases where some bureaucrat makes a bad decision and they…

I remember the world before micro USB chargers and it was a disaster only mitigated by regulation. Calling it trivial is missing the forest from the trees. It was a good decision and it's good to finally see an end to this madness after 15 years of 'Who has a Nokia/Samsung/Sony charger?' to 'Who has the USB a/b/c/iPhone cable?' to hopefully 'who has a charger?' in five years. Humanity does not have an alternative to…

The fact that my headphones, laptop, telephone, and even my electric shaver all use the same (usb-c) charger now is a complete game changer. I can't imagine what kind of hubris Apple has to not snap to that.