> Thank goodness for the EU parliament, protecting their citizenry from accidentally being exposed to the best technical outcome? Wouldn't want that.
That is a nice way to completly miss the point and how we got there, but you do you.
> I bet this doesn't have any material difference on waste.
I bet it does, you're again missing the point, it's about not going back to what we had before, and what we have now made a significant different to what we had before.
> the market is absolutely cut-throat at dealing with manufacturing processes that generate unnecessary waste.
Ah ah ah ah. Pretty much every phone until very recently had a paid of low quality headphones that were instantly thrown out or put in a box and forgotten, and it only disapeared because jack is going away, so your own exemple doesn't work.
> There are going to be better options than USB-C in some use cases. Possibly many use cases as technology improves. The legislators can't see the future - if they could they'd make better decisions.
Yes, so the regulation will need to be kept up to date, just like regulations on things like food, pesticides, industrial processes, ... Still, parliament recognized the inferiority on the technical level of a system driven by regulation in this specific case and offered manufacturers to handle it themselves without involving them, but they couldn't (more specifically, apple refused).
Anyway, each his point of view, these people are elected and I personnaly consider this a big issue that I'm glad to see resolved by my representatives.