EU lawmakers snub Apple's pleas, vote to push for charging cable standard

That's what big business would like you to think, so that you leave them alone. Truth is, the government is the only thing with power that may actually give a damn about you, even if just to get re-elected. Business cares about the bottom line only. Workers' rights, the environment, convenience? All don't matter if they hurt the bottom line.

You’re inferring something that isn’t true. The EU is not “good” or “bad” it just “is”.

They do good things and bad things, however there’s a very clear delineation between pre-2004 and post-2004. It is very clear that even if it is not a direct cause then it is at least a large push.

USB as a a standard existed for sure, but rarely if ever used on phones. (The only phone I can think of is the RAZR and that was actually a huge selling point)

I remember hearing about the directive when I had a new Sony w300i (which is a phone that came out in 2006!)

I’ll let you tell me what charger it uses.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W300i?wprov=sfti...

> and that's very little overhead for then.

Do you actually know this or are you making an assumption? The App store seems to me like it would have some significant overheads both in cost and executional complexity.

This[1] article posits that Apple made $4.2bn p.a. from app store revenue share in the period 2008 - 2018.

Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L):

1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front.

2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases.

3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management).

4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review.

5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps.

6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.)

In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates.

Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss.

I think what you might mean to say is that the app store is still a wildly profitable endeavour for Apple. I actually don't know if that's true or not. I know that Apple doesn't usually do things for free or at break even, but equally they run a combined P&L because breaking out the profitability of every single revenue line is very difficult.

In this instance, you could say: iPhone is a very profitable product, and app store is part of that. But dismissing the overheads or complexity of delivering a consumer app store on this scale seems clumsy, at best.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces...

[3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind...

[4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/

What I thought they were going for was that phones would no longer come with cable+charger, instead you could buy the one type of charger + cable that exists.

This would mean one connector for all devices.

If they allow different connectors on phones then lots of different cables will be made, and when a person switches phones then their old cable ends up in the trash.

Everything where high interoperability is more beneficial for consumers than proprietary solutions by individual companies. As a rule of thumb, everything where standardization brings more benefits to consumers than innovation.

Note that as consumer, I can't vote with my money for standardization. I can only vote for one of the proprietary solutions. So if 70% of consumers stick to one option, and 30% stick to the other option (because of other product features), standardization will never happen through market forces, even if 100% of the consumers would want it.

It gets even worse when more than 2 options are on the market, and vendors gain an advantage by locking customers in to their proprietary option.