Hacker News Reader

Comment by SamReidHughes | Hacker News Reader

So basically some subset of EU Parliament legislators have an opinion about something.

In Apple's defense, the lightning connector and previous iPod connector both served as a charging cable and computer interface cable. So it was never the same situation as the old devoted phone chargers.

And they invented them without any standard alternatives available. If this passes, the next time you think about inventing an interface and start with all your products and the whole accessory market, remember the EU Parliament might legislate away your right to use it.

View on HN

They are telling the industry to choose one common connector, and to standardize around it....

They are not dictating which one.... and that the one they choose has to be set in stone (i.e. never change)

De facto it is going to probably be USB-C, and I think it is a good move....

If years down the road, there is a new connector called USB-D (or whatever it is called), they can switch to it.... Also, this is for charging, and not data..., so it shouldn't hamper adoption of new data transport protocols.

But if it's law to use the standard connector than how do you use a different (lets say newer) connection if the law says to use the standard connector.

There's a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Somebody is going to have to build a device with a connector that isn't standard at some point to make progress.

It only means that device makers will have to agree on a new standard before they can drop the previous one. I agree that it will slow down things, but there is no chicken and egg problem.

And what if they can't agree? Maybe apple make a device so thin that even USB-C won't fit and other manufacturers explicitly decide to hobble them by not supporting a thinner connector.

This law would be great for anti-competitive practices. Lowest common denominator wins by default.

The iPad with a USB-C port is less than 6mm thick. How thin do you think tablets can actually go?

At one point I thought 6mm was impossible.

something tells me Europe doesn't care much about the limits and fallibility of regulation

Frankly phones are all limited by the USB connection on the other side of the cable. The industry can easily standardize on something, update that standard every ~5 years and be fine.

Mini USB (2000) Micro USB (2009) both predate the Lightning cable and could charge and communicate with phones at the same time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_hardware#Connector_types

But Mini and Micro USB both royally sucked. That's why they invented the lightning connector.

My point was Apple had been developing a connector at the same time. They could have worked with the USB working group and improved the standard rather than adding yet another cable type.

Yes, that's what the USB working group needed. A larger committee, with a new entrant telling them they're all wrong, dragging them through the gravel until they submit.

Better to crush them in the market.

If their goal was to crush them in the market they seem to have failed.

While on the face of it that's true, it's no accident that USB-C basically looks like a Lightning connector turned inside-out. The design of Lightning definitely influenced the design of the USB-C connector.

The power connectors to Mac mini’s in 2007 and 2008 look just like oversized USB-C connectors. I always wondered if there was any relation between the two.

"So basically some subset of EU Parliament legislators have an opinion about something."

That's...how governments work? Government officials put out a proposal because the industry can't get its act together.

That comment's on this being a bunch of news fluff.

I'm reminded about 30 times a day when dismissing a cookie popup of the stupidness of EU regulations. When considering the lifetimes wasted recreating that popup on countless websites, I'm ready to go full Libertarian.

The craziest thing about the EU pop up is that it's not actually required by law

Someone decided to do it and everyone just copied

All you need is a link to a page describing your cookie usage

That's not strictly true, unfortunately. Court cases have been brought and won against companies who do not acquire explicit consent from their users when storing information in cookies.

Companies then build solutions in reaction to these cases. The law is the ass.

Source: https://www.sueddeutsche.de/digital/cookies-eugh-urteil-webs...

"Außerdem müssen Nutzer der geplanten Cookie-Nutzung explizit zustimmen. Demnach reicht es nicht, dass Nutzer einmal bestätigen, dass sie die bereitgestellten Cookie-Informationen gelesen und verstanden haben."

"Users must explicitly agree to the planned use of cookies. It is not enough for users to confirm they have read and understood the provided cookie information."

I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. If the cookies you use are all required for normal operations that benefit the user (e.g. for login), it's fine to not have a popup.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com