EU lawmakers snub Apple's pleas, vote to push for charging cable standard
appleinsider.com
appleinsider.com
Yet the Apple statement, and most of the articles about this (including the linked one), are talking about the phone's connector and talks about lightning and usb-c. Most of the comments online are talking about how this forces Apple to use usb-c.
So, which is it? Isn't this just regulating the power bricks / back half of the charging equation? I don't see anything in the joint motion or directive stating a connector on a device has to be uniform at all.
Joint motion: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
Directive: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...
Apple has protested this, so it seems like it must be more.
Will they mandate all phones have usb-c ports? That’s absurd because who knows what’ll be the standard port in 5 years.
Not being able to charge from a backpack or a car is a non-starter for me. I go weeks without plugging my phone into the wall, but when I need it, I really need it.
I'd say there are serious physical challenges with this problem. Wireless power transfer over distances of more than an inch without big parabolic antennas is about as realistic as hoverboards.
In this hypothetical future you'd have to replace the power bank and charging cables that you currently own, but you'll be able to achieve both of those goals just fine. You can already buy power banks[1] with built-in charging coils, and I imagine some enterprising company will be along with a svelte USB-to-Qi-coil cable that suctions onto your phone any day now.
1. https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-qi-wireless-charging-...
You'd need to carry around a pack twice the size.
I don't know about effectiveness, but 20-30 minutes of wireless charging gives 60% + of battery power on my phone, and while i don't regularly charge my phone fully in the jacket, only top it off, i charge the battery pack once every week or so, and it is very rarely at 0%
[1]: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SANAG-Wireless-Portable-10000mAh-Co...
[2]: https://www.ministryofsupply.com/products/mens-mercury-intel...
Yes. And I think they will use Smart Connector currently used on iPad as Data and Power Connection. Since it isn't really a port so the devices is still all sealed up. Assuming they get rid up Sim tray as well.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
To me things appear thus: the EP passed a directive that states mobile radio equipment should have a "common charger", sensibly letting manufacturers decide how to solve the interoperability problem. Apple then argued "well, it's not explicit that you should be able use the 'common charger' without an adapter" and continued making phones that can't be charged by equipment made by others.
This join resolution isn't super clear about it, but does indicate that: "common charger" really ought to mean you can use the same charger for all similar devices.
In my attempt at reading both of these there seems to be a clear distinction being made when it refers to cables and when it refers to chargers. It also never really mentions ports.
Therefore, to me, it cares less about the port and cable on the phone half and more about the brick / part that plugs into the wall.
Neither document provides a definition for "charger". So perhaps whoever is in charge of implementing this directive (I'm not sure how this works in EU law) can interpret it either way?
I wish it was more clear.
I think reading the texts as if they spoke only of the transformer/brick itself is to narrow, and not in line with the common understanding of what a "charger" is.
I will offer this suggestion of a precise definition for "charger": the complete technological assemblage required for transferring electrical power, suitable for storage, from a common wall socket onto the portable radio device.
Basically, if you have a wall socket, a mobile radio device, and a third thing, and they cannot be assembled so that the mobile can be charger, the thing is not a "common charger".
I'd like to see some clarification :)
The 2018 Comission report has this to say on the subject for example :
The study has, in particular, provided the following information and conclusions: even manufacturers of mobile phones which did not sign up to the Memorandum of Understanding appear to have also adopted Micro-USB charging solutions, leading to the indication that almost 100% of data enabled phones sold in Europe in 2013 were compliant with Micro-USB charging solution.; due to the Memorandum of Understanding, it is estimated to have resulted in six to 21 million fewer standalone chargers over the period 2011 to 2013; the increasing prevalence of Micro-USB charging has limited the need to purchase standalone chargers and consequently reduced the use of raw materials than might otherwise have been the case.
Since the previous experience of the Memorandum of Understanding had proven to be successful for the reasons mentioned above, the Commission wished to continue the approach already followed based on a voluntary agreement. Moreover, a voluntary solution could more readily accommodate new technology and innovation compared to a regulatory option. Additionally, a voluntary approach may have had the advantage of having a wider scope, compared to the regulatory option, for example, it may have covered both ends of the charging cable 79 .
However, given the unsatisfactory outcome so far of the progress in the voluntary option, the Commission will shortly launch a study to assess costs and benefits of different options, including the regulatory one.
Also, take a look here:
> Additionally, a voluntary approach may have had the advantage of having a wider scope, compared to the regulatory option, for example, it may have covered both ends of the charging cable.
>However, given the unsatisfactory outcome so far of the progress in the voluntary option, the Commission will shortly launch a study to assess costs and benefits of different options, including the regulatory one.
This seems to say fairly clearly that only a voluntary option would cover both ends of the cable. Then it says they are looking at the regulatory option instead of the voluntary option. It doesn’t seem to contemplate a non-voluntary regulation covering both ends of the cable.
I don’t think I’m being pedantic or obtuse here, just reading the doc plainly.
Yeah but nobody would take you seriously. Read it again with the idea in mind that somehow the cable is "part of the phone": https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
Does the phone work without the cable? YES!
Does the charger work without the cable? NO!
Exceept ... in the case of wireless charging, yup. Which they explicitly mention. Would that mean that ... maybe ... the other kind of charging, involves cables?
Finally they state that one of the goals is reduction in the volume of cables collected and recycled.
The charger is obviously the thing between your phone and the power socket. It seems perfectly clear to me.
Because the entire thing is a charger. You can't use the charger without the cable. If the cable was a separate thing, fully interchangeable, the whole law wouldn't be necessary.
And they can't in hindsight decide that the cables aren't part of the "package" because they wrote in the resolution what the motivation of this law is, which is interoperability / compatibility / interchangeability and reducing waste, and if the cable part is non standard and not compatible, then obviously you'd need an additional cable to make the whole charger simply operable. Needing additional cables is what the resolution states (several times) is one of the explicit purposes, to prevent.
They also specifically discuss that wireless charging should be common as well, because not needing a cable is even better than needing the same cable.
I get the idea that sometimes EU laws are so clear and straightforward, that Americans implicitly don't trust them and expect a "gotcha!".
It's the cable that they include with the iPhone that has a USB connector on the charger end and a lightning port on the phone end.
That included cable allows you to charge with any manufacturer's USB-C charger in the same way that the previous version of the cable worked with any USB-A charging port.
So, in summary, the cable Apple gives you works with other manufacturers chargers, and the charger Apple gives you works with other phones, using a standard USB-C cable that, I would imagine, came with the phone.
If they want to force Apple's hand specifically, they should be focusing on the port on the phone, not the charger.
The point is you still need extra stuff just to charge your phone when you switch manufacturer. So what apple provides is in fact not a "common charger", but merely a transformer+rectifier that, using additional equipment, can be made into a "common charger".
They gave apple the benefit of the doubt with the 30 pin connector and lightning that apple was going to make them standards, apple hasn't made that happen, so now the EU is saying they have to use an actual standard.
I remember many years ago there was a new charger for each version(!) of a phone, so the EU said either the companies choose a common port voluntary or they will regulate them.
That was 2009 shortly after that every major phone provider switched to micro usb, except of course apple.
2014 the first regulation was voted and should have went in effect 2017.
How did we ever switch from SCART to HDMI after the EU forced the TV manufacturers to only support SCART in 1996? Oh, it didn’t.
This is complete and utter nonsense. Apple’s powerplugs for iPhone/iPad only ever came with USB-A - or now with USB-C. They thankfully switched their lightning port before USB-C was even published, when everybody was still selling broken micro-USB or barrel connectors. There are many problems to solve, but Lightning isn’t one.
USB C won’t be the standard forever, and it’s a standard that takes many forms and has caused lots of confusion, so it’s not exactly the gold standard.
USB C isn’t forever, eventually USB D will come around, and what’ll happen? The EU and their (often targeted anti-American-tech) laws will hold phones back, or leave themselves out of the market.
I would have a different perspective if there was really a practical reason for apple to go the different route — but there isn't.
Lightning being a better connector than USB-C doesn't help.
https://frayedlightningcables.tumblr.com/
Anecdotally, my friends' cables always seem to be frayed. I personally have not owned an apple phone in many years, but I recently bought an apple brand usb-c to 3.5mm adapter at an airport because that's all they had and I forgot mine at home... It stopped working after about a month of very gentle use. It's in perfect physical condition.
The point is, if you have to keep replacing them, it's not a reduction in e-waste and runs counter to the spirit of the ruling.
The only cable that stopped working was one for a power bank I got as some marketing swag, and that's only because I bent the plug.
There are always broken Apple charger cables. They don't have a rubber grommit on the end of the cables, so they wear out.
Android or PC laptop cables that are in the bin are usually in working order, with an obsolete device.
No extra stuff to connect to old devices, no extra stuff to connect to vide/displays, no extra stuff to connect to network connections, etc.
For a connector that was supposed to reduce electronic waste and simply connections, USB C has generated a lot of extra cables required.
It's worth remembering that the backers of the EU legislation started with the idea of reducing e-waste, not punishing a particular manufacturer. Nor is it a Lightning vs USB-C squabble.
Getting people to throw their lightning cables, charging ports, docking stations, etc away would be counter-productive to their aims. The Lightning port has been around for a long time and getting rid of that will cause significant e-waste.
From personal experience, Lightning already produces significant e-waste. The lack of strain relief means that my family experiences many broken Lightning cables each year.
Meanwhile, the burner phones I've bought for when I'm in the EU have these shitty all-in-one wall-to-micro-USB, and I ended up eventually throwing them out. So there's your e-waste.
The fact you couldn't charge all your other gadgets is the point of the regulation though.
So is Lightning, but at least it’s slightly more robust physically.
USB-C and be done with it.
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.
Fixing to a specific standard would also not be something done in EU law - laws are meant to be slow-changing, this would be a barrier. You might have a law that specifies that a standard should be set and/or industry bodies ought to agree on a standard to use.
This feels that it’s banking on USB-C being forever future proofed or wireless connections does everything we ever need.
As a customer, I'd like to keep the option for "best."
And of course, all laptops would be mandated to have VGA connectors, eliminating a ton of conference room presentation guesswork.
Similarly, your projector is already using a standardized power cable: The one that goes into your wall socket.
For cables that don't terminate with a regular 2/3 prong on the other end, there are a few standardized shapes there too. My monitors and PC PSUs all take the same sort of connector on the non-wall-socket end even if they pull different amperages.
Implementing a different standard, even if it is non-proprietary, won't do.
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/RC-9-2020-0070...
"5. Points out that the Commission, without hampering innovation, should ensure that the legislative framework for a common charger will be scrutinised regularly in order to take into account technical progress; reiterates the importance of research and innovation in this domain to improve existing technologies and come up with new ones;"
"[...] the Commission, without hampering innovation, should ensure that the legislative framework for a common charger will be scrutinised regularly in order to take into account technical progress; reiterates the importance of research and innovation in this domain to improve existing technologies and come up with new ones;"
The days where you needed special proprietary software to access any part of your phone if you connected it with to a computer using its special cable?
I remember losing plenty of sms history and contacts when changing phones because the dedicated phone software was too old to run on my windows, and the dodgy program I found on the internet wouldn't work with my specific model.
I also remember how in these heady days of unbridled innovation my girlfriend saved her sms's by writing them down on paper. And this was a fairly sensible solution to the innovation rich state of the market, where every manufacturer and close to every individual model, was its own silo.
Power distribution, wall sockets and fire safety, fire hydrant connections were all unregulated and subject to innovation at some point. A fire engine from a different city could not connect to your water supply. At some point we decided that it wont do. We are gradually arriving to that point in software.
What are you actually saying? "if a toaster doesn't work off USB C, neither should an iPhone have to?
Some people believe it's time for a standard interface between a phone and a charger.
If there's no regulation enforcing this, it's because the EU doesn't think it's necessary — the industry has agreed upon a standard without intervention.
Which is exactly what the EU asked them to do with chargers, 15 years ago :) And then they didn't so here's the resolution.
Maybe it’s a good idea to let the market compete and come up with better ideas than the government mandating things....
Fire engines? No.
The law does no say what a common charger is. Manufacturers are free to migrate to a new standard.
No, it literally says they're calling on the industry to agree on a common standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
Lightning appeared in 2012. USB-C appeared in 2014.
20 years means we'd apparently still be waiting for another 12 years for USB-C. Hardly helps your argument.
At the office, this was solved by giving me two cables - one for charge and one for data which connect to the DisplayPort.
The only thing as painful is the box of unlabelled hdmi cables I have that all works to varying degrees.
I think it's a reasonable possibility that we would all still be waiting for dual orientation if this mandate had been in place back then.
Dual orientation vs carrying two sets of dongles & cables isn't a net win either, so don't think the innovation argument sticks either.
They can make USB 4, 5,6, connector C, D,E,Z, whatever. That's fine. What's not cool, is creating proprietary connector and not letting anyone else use it.
Mind you they only have to agree on charging, not data transfer.
As to whether it's worth it: hard to tell, there comes a time in a technology's maturity where compliance with a common standard is more important than incremental innovation. The power sockets in your house are dtandard, and your power company and electrician are not allowed to innovate, because at some point we decided compatability was more important.
If an agreement of all manufacturers is needed before introducing a new standard in production, it means that it will be delayed by the lowest common denominator of manufacturers until many years later. Which isn't good for the consumer, because they could've gotten a new superior charging standard on their phones many years earlier, as opposed to waiting multiple years until all manufacturers adopt it.
It sounds like you're arguing that the lowest common denominator phone manufacturer will be holding up progress. But the connector is the easiest part, especially if it's a truly ubiquitous standard, because it will be heavily commoditized. The lowest common denominator phone manufacturer will just buy whatever the cheapest connector from China is, and this will almost always be whatever connector is most common.
And yes, it is pretty normal to have manufacturers sit round a table and agree standards -most ports on a computer, 4g wireless, etc.
You cant even come up with your own phone communication standard - countries allocate frequency specifically for 4g or 5g, none will give you a frequency band for a proprietary communication standard.
But guess what? Only the end connecting to the wall is standard, the end connecting to devices in the house are far from standard. How is this different than iPhones?
Think a bit broader - if apple wants to introduce a new phone communication standard, like 5g but different? It can't - frequencies are allocated for a specific purpose, and none will give you any for a proprietary protocol only you control.
This is not such a revolutionary idea if you look at a broader picture
But the government didn’t mandate that iMessage had to be compatible with SMS (even though it is somewhat) nor did they mandate that AirDrop had to interoperate with a standard.
Should the government also mandate a standard messaging protocol must be used or that it has to work with SMS?
Should FaceTime be forced to be interoperable?
Radio frequencies are some of the most strictly regulated things on the planet, and misusing them will land you in jail in most countries.
For instance, Sprint had WiMAX for 4G before they had LTE, two carriers have GSM and two have CDMA. The government didn’t mandate the protocols nor did they force the carriers to use the same protocol or the phone makers to support both.
You also had the proprietary Nextel push to talk.
All the protocols you listed are open for adoption by various manufacturers. Apple absolutely would not be allowed to use them for a private protocol they keep to themselves. Airwaves are a public good, not private property. They even come with coverage obligations.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/about-ofcom/latest/media/media-rele...
https://www.rcrwireless.com/20160401/opinion/worst-week-bold...
Not only that, even before Sprint acquired Nextel, Nextel was using the spectrum it had for its own proprietary wireless protocols and it wasn’t Big Government that killed either initiative - it was people exercising their own free will not buying Nextel phones and later WiMAX phones.
Most would link Sprint’s WiMAX decision back to its acquisition of Nextel Communications, which wrapped in 2005, and brought with it a significant load of 2.5 GHz spectrum licenses with specific build out dates. Nextel prior to being acquired had been testing various IP-based mobile broadband technologies, including various proprietary ones like Flash-OFDM and TDD-UMTS, as well as WiMAX and HSDPA.
Wait, are there places in the EU where is SMS is still that popular?
https://www.smseagle.eu/2017/03/06/daily-sms-mobile-statisti...
But as far as I'm aware in Europe everybody is on WhatsApp, Telegram or something similar that uses data. But maybe I'm wrong and there's still some holdout EU country still texting, that is why I asked. But they generally all have pretty good data plans.
Are you saying that no one will ever need anything besides USB C?
Their current phones already follow a charging standard: qi. The $5 qi charger at Ikea charges an iPhone just fine. I have one on my desk.
Now, you are probably thinking that if something goes wrong, you'd rather be able to fix it than to throw your phone in the trash, generating more unnecessary waste. So Apple should take the lead and put a diagnostic port on each phone. Perhaps at the bottom, in the middle. To reduce the negative environmental impact of designing a new diagnostic port connection cable, Apple should design their diagnostic interface to be compatible with the billions of Lightning and/or USB-C cables already in the hands of consumers and repair shops.
That would be courageous.
Apple has kept working on improving the charging experience for its phones over time. The original iPhone cable, then lightning, then wireless charging. This stifles innovation.
Also: doesn't the government have more pressing concerns to worry about?
I doubt Apple's lobbying against this for some nefarious reason, like locking users into their proprietary technology.
At that point my purchases of lightning cables stopped after I was able to take advantage of it.
> I doubt Apple's lobbying against this for some nefarious reason
Apple always, always fights for control. It is not nefarious per se, but it is usually at the (literal) expense of their customers.
It's also worth noting that Apple began the move from Lightning to USB-C charging on iOS devices in 2018. The next generation of iPhones won't use Lightning.
EDIT: The point is that Apple's been moving to standards-based charging for both macOS and iOS products for some time, making this EU effort even less necessary than it may first appear.
We shall see.
Sounds like "why spend money on NASA when we have poverty here on earth?".
Governments have a lot of people and a lot of resources and can work on more than one thing at a time.
> Apple has kept working on improving the charging experience for its phones over time
And it will continue to do so. Except it now has to convince others to adopt its improvements.
You get a free charging cable usually when you purchase a new phone and charging cables are cheap.
I get the environment argument but I don't see how this moves the needle on protecting the environment. If anything it could scare off tech companies from developing charging cables that are better for the environment.
As for "not moving the needle", every little thing sums up. Also, it's not just the cables - manufacturing lines, shelf space, redundant labor, ...
I understood the parent post as arguing that having a unique cable isn't so bad because you get one for free with the device, among other things. While this is true, my counter is that having a single cable over multiple devices is still nice.
The government also made interracial marriage illegal as recently as 50 years ago and same sex relationships illegal as recently as the 80s.
You’ll have to excuse me if I’d rather not give the government power unnecessarily.
But is “think about the environment” the new “think about the children” and “terrorism” war cry for more regulation and big government?
Maybe try to look at this differently: is your life better for the fact that when you travel you need to bring power plug adapters? If cars had different gas plugs that required different gas stations, would that be nice?
But in fact, you can sell a car with non standard methods of making it move - see Tesla. They didn’t have to wait for the nanny state or other manufacturers to agree on a standard before it started shipping cars.
The market decided it was worth the tradeoff.
I don’t like the needlessly proprietary cable and I actually put that on the list of reasons not to upgrade to a newer iPhone.
When I look at switching to Android I weigh the crappy Apple cable against the loss of privacy of moving to Android.
The iPhone wins. Just.
If Apple saw that enough customers switch to Android because of the cable they would change - free markets are amazing.
You can't have it both way dude unless you think Apple is afraid and going to loose money which might bring down the stock value.
85% of the world chooses Android. If you want to choose your browser, you are free to choose Android also.
There aren’t two platforms with equal privacy available but differing power connectors.
I’m forced to prioritise privacy over proprietary connectivity.
If all things were equal then I could vote with my wallet and I’m sure the market would fix this... but all things aren’t equal so market isn’t going to solve this problem.
In that situation you need an external authority to set a standard.
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.
It’s perfectly possible to have sensible hardware standards where doing so will not impede the market without insisting that all software be also standardised.
For the record I think it would be useful for Apple to have the built in Facetime client be able to communicate with other phone platforms. I don’t think Apple should be compelled to offer that currently.
The Android market is just like the PC market of old - a slow moving race to the bottom. Even today, most low end Android phones are still using Micro USB.
Again, to not be misunderstood, I'm not sure if charger standardization is indeed overwhelmingly beneficial for everyone. That is what I believe we should discuss here.
The regulation set out to do something and the problem is basically solved. It worked.
The government cares most about their own power. It’s naive to think that the government “cares” about anything besides being re-elected.
The government should be involved in regulating where there are negative externalities. Negative externalities are not - I don’t like having two cables.
Also politicians care about what the majority wants. As long as you’re part of that majority you’re fine. But if you aren’t - the last thing you want is more government power.
Businesses don’t have the ability to take away my property or liberty. The government does. Given a choice between the two, Id rather the government have less power.
I leave open if this particular intervention on chargers is beneficial for the public or not, but you will have to argue about chargers to make a point, not about governments and markets.
The difference is that businesses don’t have the power of the state to compel me to buy their products. I can change phones a lot easier than I can change governments.
I want my iPhone and my Android phone and my tablet and my notebook to share the same charging port. I would definitely buy an iPhone with USB-C if the market would offer one to me. However, the market won't give that to me. Even if 90% of iPhone buyers would prefer USB-C over Lightning, Apple would not give it to us, because it is beneficial for their business to build their own walled garden.
I don't know if forcing Apple to agree with other vendors is a net benefit for all consumers or not. However, as you seem to have a very strong opinion on why that would be detrimental to consumers, you need to show where consumers would be negatively affected, specifically for charging ports.
This has nothing to do with what one thinks about governments in general.
But why stop at the connector? Why not force Apple to make AirDrop, FaceTime interoperable? Why not force Apple to port iCloud backups to Android or force Apple to allow backups to third party providers?
Making things a little more convenient for everybody is super-compelling if there is no downside. Freedom for humans is an extremely high value. However, companies are not humans, there is no inherent benefit in giving them as much freedom as possible. And I know economics well enough to confidently state that freedom for companies does not naturally cause well-being and freedom for humans.
And definitely: Every country regulated power outlets. Every country regulated landline phone connections. Every country regulated mobile phone transmission. EU even regulated mobile phone roaming prices. Now they are regulating chargers. And I hope they won't stop, but do everything to keep modern technology open. Industry loves to lock consumers into separate, proprietary, walled gardens. There is no viable strategy for individual consumers to escape. The only viable strategy to escape is by regulation.
As far as not being able to escape, before 2007-2010, everyone feared the Windows lock-in, technology and the market made that not as big of a fear. Before that it was IBM.
By the time the slow moving government finally made a decision about IBM’s mainframe monopoly that it started in the 60s - in the mid 80s - the market had made the case irrelevant.
As far as everyone liking the files of the EU - see Brexit.
Where is the advantage in waiting for the market?
However, no one forces you to live in the EU. Even countries can exit it. Let us do our thing, and you can do your thing. The market will sort it out :-)
Microsoft is just as dominant with Office and desktop PCs as it was in the 90s. The web and then mobile just made the desktop less relevant.
Also it wasn’t the choice of browsers that made Windows less relevant. It was that everything moving to the web made Windows less relevant and that gave to the rise of the modern mobile platforms now that you could do everything on the web that most people cared about and then the app economy.
What do you really think had a bigger impact on even IE losing marketshare, browser choice or the most popular website destination - Google - giving prime advertising real estate to Chrome and Google bundling Chrome with third party apps left and right?
We also see from FB that the little fines that governments hand out don’t stop corporations from behaving in a way that the government doesn’t like.
It’s amazing what people can do without needing the nanny state.
What next? Standardizing poser cords will help reduce terrorism and protect children?
I mean, I know from the American cultural point of view, government intervention is like a last resort, and you have to prove that it's absolutely necessary in order to apply it. Government is seen as an enemy and every one of its actions seen as a potential limiter of freedom, hence the right to bear arms (I hope it never becomes necessary, I suspect guns vs. drones and missiles wouldn't be a very fair fight).
But we are talking about an EU directive here. As an European, if the government makes regulations that make life more convenient for me (and other citizens), that's amazing, it's what I'm voting and paying them for. And I think most Europeans would see it that way.
Because letting corporations do whatever they want is destroying the planet.
This reduces eWaste.
"Free". It's amazing how many consumers see it this way. When everyone has the same charger phone companies can actually start putting it in as an optional paid add-on, which virtually no consumer will take. The hypothetical environment argument is spurious at best.
Arguably not Charger, but you do get the possibility of improved charger or higher power charging. But all cables wear out. So not really wrong with providing it by default.
A more obvious analogy: Why are governments spending effort on standardize the meter, or screw sizes?
We did and they unanimously made the worst and most uninnovative solutions for costumers.
The inability to borrow cables or swap them between devices in the past was a not insignificant hassle. Keeping boxes of cables, not being able to borrow a friend's charger when visiting, not being able to replace cables except by ordering a new one from the manufacturer half a world away. Constant minor irritation.
The EU's first round of cable standardisation remains one of my favourite quality-of-life laws. No slightly more reliable cable is worth more than me than knowing I can use the same cable on as many devices as possible, and that I'm never going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere unable to buy a replacement charger for my phone.
It's also a point which the invisible hand has a great deal of trouble solving, because phones are such a vital part of life that you're unlikely to refuse to buy simply on the basis of its charger. It's an easy bit of revenue for manufacturers to jump on, because they know it's probably not quite annoying enough to significantly affect device choice. I love me a free market solution, but it's important to recognise where the market fails, and we've already seen it fail to solve this problem once.
Lightning is a crap proprietary design from my point of view. If it was USB-C I could just change the cable.
I’ve got a Lightning cable with worn out gold plated contact points, the springs in the phone are perfectly fine.
My point being that without some reliable statistics pointing to springs being way more susceptible to wear than gold plated contact points, it doesn’t make any difference.
(FWIW: I currently work with factory equipment for PCB production testing and bad contact due to oxidation and wear is a much bigger issue than springs going bad, but that’s just my experience.)
$4 per cable in licensing fees for every single cable sold sounds pretty nice to me. I can understand Apple wanting to keep that.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/02/07/apple-lowers-mfi-...
That seems high considering that Anker (chosen as a cheap but good company presumably not dodging Apple's licensing scheme) is selling lightning cables on Amazon for 8 bucks [1]
Amazon Basics has them for 6.50 [2]
I don't think they are sending 50% and 75% of their gross to Apple.
1> https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Powerline-Lightning-Probably-Ce...
2> https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert...
Apple charges 30% for the app store, 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/
To illustrate (accept you may be too busy to do the research, but I'm trying to show you why a company which does $250bn a year in revenue doesn't give a shit about the max $4 & probably more like 2% licensing fee it takes per cable sold):
1. Why do you believe that this is a profitable endeavour for Apple? 2. Can you think of other reasons they might do this, beyond "making money"? 3. Can you point to the line in Apple's quarterly reporting which includes these cables? Did it spike in the quarters following the introduction of Lightning?
2. There are roughly 1.5 billion devices with Lighting Port, if only 10% of its user buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150M per year. Not to mention they ship 250M lightning cables inside new devices every year that could be used to mask their BOM and margin. From Apple's perspective, that is a 400M profits per year business.
Counting pennies means saving money. It does not mean driving revenue through low-cost licensing sales.
I think your point is that Apple has such significant scale that just charging a few bucks a year to a fraction of their users means that they make what you or I would consider to be significant revenue.
> if only 10% of its users buy a new cable every year at $1 net profits that is $150m a year
My points, summarised:
1. As someone who is extremely familiar with Apple's business, MFI looks like it's as much about minimising costs and preserving CSAT than driving revenue.
2. We can at least infer that even if the ludicrous (sorry) assumptions you've made are true, we're talking about a business line which contributes less than 1% to Apple's bottom line. The total revenue generated by MFI is likely to be far, far less than that: I imagine in the order of $80m USD a year, on a company which -- again -- does $250 BILLION a year of revenue.
The crux of my argument is: Apple does not care sufficiently about selling you cables and dongles to derange engineering decisions on their products. Nobody at Apple is saying "let's not switch to USB-C because we can keep making money from MFI and lightning dongles."
People constantly make this bullshit claim that Apple makes engineering decisions so that they can sell you a dongle or a cable, and it's so patently illogical that nobody should feel happy repeating it.
Since you are talking about "revenue" and not profits, I can assure you the world sells more than 80M MFi lightning cable per year.
There are absolute number, hundreds of millions, or there are relative numbers. 1%. Just to make a point, AMD only earn a Net Income or 300M this year.
The same argument could have made for Apple to provide more iCloud Storage for Free, Which they wont.
This type of regulation will kill the west. The amount of money and waste it cost to create this regulation will far exceed any value it ever adds in terms of measurable productivity.
Not to mention that innovation is killed with this type of approach... USB standards change for reasons..
But hey I'm glad you can borrow 100% of all of your friends cables to charge your phone rather than 90% today.... ️
And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple.
If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations.
I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.
Also; iPhone domination is not nearly as prevalent outside of the US.
Um... No. It has nothing to do with that EU standardisation. The USB converged on all Android SmartPhone was because it was cheap, and it transfer Data fairly fast. Which was the De-Facto Standard on PC.
Back then, you usually had zero chance of finding a compatible cable with your phone unless your went to a specialized store. Different models by the same manufacturer had different cables, even different versions of the same model often had different cables as well.
Not only was every phone manufacturer having their own charger, often they would have different charging ports between models or product categories within the same brand!
The landscape you’re describing now exists precisely because of this directive.
And manufacturers can evolve to new chargers (like USB-C instead of micro-b, we saw this happen) it’s just that manufacturers have to agree amongst themselves.
There are open standards for instant communication. How many proprietary protocols and implementations exist? How many are so widely adopted?
Contrast that with open ones.
There’s quite a lot of money in peripherals; it’s also a neat way of obsoleting older phones. Broken custom chargers were usually the reason I stopped using a phone; meaning I bought a new one.
I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work.
As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea.
Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.
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...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#H...
USB has been used in phones for a very long time indeed.
This claim the EU politely requested the whole tech industry to develop a standardised power cable and they leapt into action because such a brilliant idea had never occurred to anyone before doesn't match the timelines of the actual tech development. USB was around a long time, was happening anyway and the non-binding MoU the EU demanded firms sign had no impact on the only firm that still wanted to do their own cable, as Apple's actions proved quite directly.
To re-emphasise the point, if the EU had passed binding regulations like this at an earlier stage in its life we might have never had MagSafe. Or we might have ended up standardising on barrel connectors.
Sure, none come to mind right now, but then, I never though I'd be groaning past two dozen cookie dialogs per day, either.
I was under the impression that Apple was behind the curve on wireless. My wife and I bought our phones at around the same time, her iPhone doesn't have wireless, my Android does.
Bear in mind, not all Android do; that was one reason I didn't buy the Pixel when I bought my phone; no wireless charging was a deal breaker.
This eventually forced Apple into creating a lossy Lightning-to-HDMI adapter that would receive low bitrate h264 from your professional use iPad and decode it into its final artifact riddled form for output on HDMI.
> like locking users into their proprietary technology
What else is it? They won't license Lightning to anyone else, they didn't license 30 pin to anyone else.
The majority of phones use (micro) USB for charging, only Apple and a few others use a different format, and people who can afford Apple devices can afford buying a charger just for that device.
Is it just on the connector? Is it the charger plug? Amount of wires in the cable? Cable gauge? Power rating? Proprietary charging protocols?
If everything about charging portable devices must be truly universal, then every single piece of the puzzle must be the same for everyone. Sure, Apple is the most prominent example because they use a different connector, but should things like Qualcomm's proprietary charging protocols not also be banned then? Unless they're willing to license it for free to everyone
How much power should the chargers be rated for? 5W, 18W, 50W? Different devices have different power requirements, so should we just have all chargers rated at the max that the spec allows for?
Just because the connector is the same also does not mean that the devices will actually work together, lightning cables already have the requirement of MFI certification from Apple, and they could probably do the exact same over a USB-C cable.
Forcing people to throw away most of a decade's worth of already purchased cables and accessories does seem like an odd way to cut down on ewaste given the fact that Apple already switched the chargers themselves to USB-C.
I guess my lightning compatible alarm clock/docking station can go live on a nice farm with my long gone 30 pin alarm clock/dock, where they can both run and play.
When they decided to make the iPod PC compatible we ended up with a connector that was passing through FireWire, USB, audio, playback controls, and the kitchen sink.
After a certain point, they started passing through video as well.
Apple has been trying out cables and transfer types over the years (thunderbolt, CD-ROM, USB, wireless) and they do it on the backs of the luxury users, not too far off from what the luxury car makers in testing what to propagate downstream.
Apple has set a standard to use their cable format, which works. If you go through the litany of USB-B there were power issues, transfer rates, and a whole host of other items that, while it met the standard, did not work. An example is my Barnes & Noble Nook needing a special cable to work with the PC; it was USB-B, but not using the right transfer and power source rendered cables useless for interface.
If anyone can say the roll out of USB-C has been better, even with the “standard” then there have been a number of articles on here that have pointed to fake cables, horrible QC and other items.
So, a government agency has taken the draconian step of forcing a standard, one which will be helpful for the European companies that produce phones and people wonder why there is so much money in politics.
Edit: even if the innovations is just faster data transfer and more power.
And I think that it‘s a good thing that things don’t change all the time!
Our electronic devices that we use regularly need 4 different chargers! I‘m looking forward to the day when it‘s all just going to be USB-C.
And precisely which other manufacturers have Apple licensed this standard (Lightning) to?
And by that I mean not "we will deign to allow you to make cables for our products", but "here's a new standard connector everyone can use".
It's absolutely laughable to claim Lightning as any kind of standard.
> A great way to stifle innovation.This law doesn't forbid any innovative technology, it just mandate there is at least one way to charge phones with a standard charger. It can be an adapter, a second port or whatever solution they find.
On average, over the life of the device, every device needed to be sent to Apple to replace worn ports. Some unlucky sales people managed 2 or 3 trips to Apple. The annoying bit is that the turnaround time isn't exactly fast so we ended up provisioning the affected people new machines and then throwing the refurbs back in the rotation.
We never heard a peep from the Dells we also deployed that had a USB-C port for the dock, HDMI ports for the AV, and a dedicated port for charging. I like the idea of one port for all but they're just not strong enough.
edit: and if there has to be a weak point it should be on the cable side, not on the port side.
Is this really the problem we need to be spending our regulatory energies on in 2020?
Originally, the lightning port was a big improvement over existing tech. Currently though, the only reason the lightning port still exists is because it is a good way for Apple to use their market dominant position to milk consumers. It is not good for consumers, it is also not good for the environment. It is good just for Apple.
It is generally the job of the govt to prevent these types of abuses. Is this particular law worded the right way for that? Maybe, maybe not, but it will do the job for this particular case.
But still, despite all of this salt I don't think it warrants legislation.
I think a more appropriate tool would be launching an investigation into why they've stuck with lightning when everyone else (including their other products!) use USB-C. That should essentially prove there is no good reason, other than making money off licensing, without regard to damaging the environment or exploiting the consumer. So they should get a giant fine for it and stop doing it.
But I don't believe there is the legal framework for the EU to do that, so they're trying to get the outcome they want using the tools that they have.
For similar reasons, I suspect there's at least some factions in Apple that would be secretly pleased with a mandated switch to USB-C, because then they'd be able to get past it by redirecting any complaints to the government involved.
Also if Apple were that bothered by complaining, it would not have taken them 5 years and 3+ years of service programs to replace their laptops' butterfly keyboards with regular scissors switch keyboards.
Maybe you own a USB-C laptop or tablet? Maybe even from the same company?
https://www.amazon.com/Honor-Unlocked-Smartphone-Dual-Lens-E...
“Whats in the box:phone, power/wall charger, Micro USB cable and sim ejection tool.”
"Honor 7X has the distinction of being one of the last phones to feature a micro USB port for charging instead of USB-C. Blame the price if you must..."
Well done.
This is the first phone that shows up when you go to MetroPCS.
https://www.t-mobile.com/cell-phone/lg-aristo-4-plus
And it uses Micro USB.
https://www.amazon.com/Aristo-Compatible-Charger-Transfer-Mi...
If you care to go down the list of all the cheap Android phones that are sold, you will see a lot of phones that use micro USB.
As far as super cheap - that basically defines most Android phones being sold.
One that wouldn't have been invented if this regulation existed at that time, incidentally.
https://www.amazon.com/Charger-AYNGWRNB-Certified-Lightning-...
But if Apple is being “abusive” by having proprietary hardware, does that mean they should also force Nintendo to use standard media for the Switch? Should they also force Apple to allow iPhones to run a more standard operating system?
I get the feeling these aren't legitimately certified.
https://www.amazon.com/Braided-Charger-Charging-Compatible-S...
Also, the lightening cables now show $9.99 for me.
Remember the time each new phone model had a new charger?
And you had to replace the whole charger if the cable was broken?
That changed because ten years ago the EU forced the companies to change their way and I think it didn't stiffle innovation but made developing a good standard even more important which lead to usb C.
Of course it should be the default to keep it that way, but it seems companies need to have someone looking over their shoulders and regulate them to be sane.
It is not, and the EU law has very little ( if anything ) to do with it. What you describe as different charger and cables were before the Smartphone era.
It's a material burden on the rest of us though. Every home has a dozen cables where 2 would do. The reduction of eWaste is a noble goal.
Sure. Now multiply it by half a billion people though (EU population). Suddenly considerations like "this creates e-waste" matter
It sounds like they're trying to standardize the actual chargers, I wonder how that will work USB-PDs many different modes? What about proprietary fast charging schemes? (maybe those already died out after the move to USB-c?).
I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea of a universal standard stifling innovation, so hopefully the EU will be responsive if something better gets invented in the future. I'm guessing that whatever comes after USB-C will exist in the US and Asia for years before its allowed in the EU... which may or may not be a good thing I suppose. USB-C as a plug has so many capabilities.
It's interesting that they're looking at wireless charging too. Other than my toothbrush and an induction stove, I can't remember the last time I saw wireless charging that wasn't Qi. The only exception is some of the experimental room-scale charging startups. I suppose they're already fighting against the laws of physics, the laws of the EU can't be that much worse.
It looks more like the latter. After all, Apple is the odd one out now.
https://www.androidcentral.com/eu-may-push-iphones-adopt-usb...
It's the cable included in the box with newer iPhones that is USB-C on one end and lightning on the other.
Looking at what happened with RoHS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...; the EU forbid the use of lead-based solder, and the world mostly followed because, if they didn’t, the logistics and lower economies of scale would cost more than using the cheaper processes), it will have to be a lot better to make it worthwhile to manufacturers to completely replace their charging connector by something newer.
I think it’s more likely ‘USB’ will remain the sticker on whatever comes next, with enough backwards compatibility to satisfy EU regulations.
(‘USB’ is a marketing term, anyways. Current USB looks nothing like the first version)
How so? You can plug a first gen, USB 1.0 mouse into an Android phone's USB-C port with no more than a passive adapter, and it'll work. That's way more commonality than "just a marketing term" - it's functionally backwards compatible at the electrical, protocol, and driver level.
USB1: 4 wires, half-duplex, with the host in control. Upstream- and downstream ports determine who’s the host. Negotiation of bus speed in hardware, using a few diodes/wires.
USB3: 9 wires, full-duplex, uses 8b/10b encoding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding). Negation of bus speed in software.
USB-C: adds more power options, displayLink.
Heavy handed laws will only increase how fast they get left behind as a targeted market.
Apple would sell you a non standard power socket for your house if they could.
The Little Red Hen obviously isn't taught enough over there.
Parasites and busybodies.
I don't think Apple are the biggest assholes in this situation.
"I know what is best for you, so I'll force you to make the car safety features I want".
It's not legitimate to regulate manufacture or commercialization of products when that manufacture or commercialization poses no direct threat to the physical well-being of other individuals.
Your scope is absurdly narrow.
Regulating emotions is arbitrary. Maybe it makes me sad that you post comments on HN. Should your comments be regulated?.
Physical harm is where you draw the line, because it's the only line that makes sense.
/s ... but seriously, yes, somehow claiming physical stuff is clean got popular, probably because of our intuition about the world, but it wasn't the case since people stsrted engaging in politics, trade, rituals, shaming each other for various reasons, invented organized religion, and so on.
Though of course regulating emotions is a silly reductio ad absurdum, but there are a lot of steps between physical harm and woke feels. Such as monetary damages as determined by a court for things like discrimination, abuse of market position, libel/slander.
We are talking about law, not social expectation. It's not at all fine to waste someone's time, cost them money, destroy them emotionally, or insult their mother.
But it shouldn't be illegal.
Regulations are centered around equality of outcome not equality of opportunity. People are not the same. Regions are not the same. They have localized, nuanced for better or worse problems and solutions. It's crazy to have completely separate input factors and expect the same outcome..
The idea here is that "of we regulate it people will have access to safer livelihoods" the reality is that you are raising the barrier to entry for that particular lifestyle and in effect reducing lower class socio economic accessibility. Just because the feds mandate all new cars have backup cams doesn't mean people can afford the costs associated with it. People should have the ability to leverage risk to better their financial well being. Anything else and you have no class mobility and no autonomy.
People pay a fixed percent of their income into the HC system.
Furthermore, while you are attending school (university, college, whatever), you are automatically covered.
There was a small token copay system for a few years about 10 years ago, that helped to cut down wait queues. (It was something like 2USD for each visit, because there was a sentiment, that too many people went to the doctor unnecessarily.)
There are of course possible ways to optimize it a lot more by incentivizing healthy lifestyle choices (eg. risk weighted additional premium to counter obesity, smoking, drinking, etc).
The effect on mobility is nothing since it's a percentage "tax".
Autonomy is nice, but cleaning up uninsured carcasses also has a cost, so autonomous folks should at least prepay that.
Alternatively If you lived freely, you could make 100$, decide you pay 60$for insurance if you want to feel safer and get the benefits from that service orrrr you could say "man I don't need that service right now in my life, so I'm going to invest that money instead while I'm young" and then not be poor..
Yea 50 years ago when nobody had health insurance the bodies piling up were a burden on society because everyone was dying because nobody could afford medical treatment..
Plus I already live quite freely, thanks.
I have no problem with having an option for people that would need to pay only when the need arises. (And they would pay full price, go into debt, or they would be euthanized if they haven't paid at least X years of HC insurance plus they have no money, nor any reasonable chance of making some after recovery.) That would be a nice natural experiment.
No, not at all.
It happened because legislators in the EU don't understand tech, don't understand re-cycling, don't understand the industry, but they all use iPhones+Androids and wonder why 'there are so many goddam cables'. It's a very specific problem that just happens to be visceral and immediate with the people in charge: they can all relate to it. So they want to 'do something' and 'legislation' is what they do.
It's the wrong approach I hope cooler heads prevail.
In fact, I still have a box full of wall-warts from at least 5 phone manufacturers, and not one would fit on a different maker's phone. In fact, for some producers, the power plugs were even different for different models.
Yeah, I so miss those days.
Now tell me, how many of those wall warts are from Apple and don’t have a USB-Port or a fixed cable? Exactly 0.
Now tell me how many of the other manufacturer’s power adaptors have either a fixed cable or a non-USB port?
All wall warts that came with any Apple Phone or iPad I ever used are still usable because they are USB.
Which is totally not a coincidence because back then, the EU was pondering forcing a common standard down producer's side.
I still have a Apple FireWire-wall wart from my old iPod, though. Again not a coincidence. It resides in the box with all the fondly-remembered Nokia- and Siemens plugs from the same time.
'Those days' of 'many connectors' will not go away, they'll just be another layer of weird multifaceted connectors, confusion, and lawsuits with respect to the actual meaning of the legislation.
With respect to sustainability, even perfectly formulated legislation will have zero impact on the amount we recycle.
But now when I arrive at any website I have to accept cookie policy, then I have to accept that they will invade my privacy and log my data (or waste half an hour un-checking boxes) and only then can I get down to the business of not signing up to their newsletter and not downloading their app.
Maybe this is simpler but tech companies seem to find loopholes faster than they can be closed and we just get stuck in the middle with a crap version of what we had before.
They want to make it as hard for you to protect your privacy as possible. It’s the same reason they bug you install an app instead of using the web. In an app you have even less control.
Notice the number of sites that have an enable all but no disable all button?
Thing is if they’re using dark patterns at this stage how can you trust the content of the page you’re trying to view?
I suspect the EU will introduce new legislation in due course, but of course, they are heavily lobbied too by the tech industry, so it may take some time.,
I’m not arguing for a return to what we had. Just pointing out that what we have does not work yet.
Plus lots of companies are clearly in breach - like when they say ‘by continuing to use this site you agree to the terms and conditions’ this is not active consent. But nothing is done.
If you have to uncheck the boxes, the site is not GDPR compliant.
GDPR says that consent have to be given explicitly, not implicitly with an explicit opt-out option.
Thus the EU has massively reduced online tracking, and that is great.
Some of them are inactive consent too. ‘By continuing to use the site, we own your soul’ etc
In my experience it's three clicks or so to turn off data gathering. I could not be happier with the GDPR.
Hopefully this behaviour will change once the ongoing cases make their way through the court system.
And it’s not individual sites going rogue. It’s clearly a box from an ad network. Not sure how you haven’t come across these.
Go try and get into this site while declining cookies
It just pops up the consent dialogue full screen again (on mobile at least) until you accept
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-autos-electric-norway/ele...
edit: Oh wow you have to do that per click. Wow.
Let's hope they get sued for that.
https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/introduction-to-the-basic...
This has no reject button, only accept and covers up half the page until you accept.
Some companies might start to rethink if they really need all this tracking technology. For example, I've removed Google Analytics from all sites that I was responsible for when the GDPR went into effect. I've decided that the potential liablility, and the inconvenience for the user was just not worth the small upside of knowing how many people clicked which link.
I've also stopped including tracking pixels in email newsletters, and I've also convinced others to stop using Google Analytics.
With the GDPR, you now at least know that some websites are going to do everything to track you, and it's an informed choice.
The adtech/publishing industry is beyond belief. Instead of reducing 3rd party tracking, they've just added another 3rd party used to track whether they have consent to track you. And then they still track you even if you don't agree, because all that code is crap and/or they don't care.
My brother remarked recently: "What's the point of having thin laptops, if you have to carry a book-size hub with you." (Which is also the reason people might be tempted to wastefully discard USB-A peripherals in favour of USB-C alternatives.)
it's a pity that Apple didn't play ball voluntarily, and had to be ordered to be nice.
But there is no way Lightning could be a standard because only Apple is using it.
"an expensive legislative bill" was not the first recourse to "how we solve that problem". But it is a necessary fallback.
And if Apple was going to switch to USB C anyways, whats the point of this legislation?
I agree in general; but at some point don't we hit diminishing returns? If I were to say, "18.4 exabytes of RAM ought to be enough for everybody", that'd be basically correct, even future-proofing for the craziest sci-fi holodeck use cases we can imagine, right?
As much as I am for interoperability, a legislation directing a specific technology is one way how we end up with ridiculous standards.
Remember, we still have laws on where we can or cannot tie a horse in town on the books a century after they were irrelevant. Laws move in centuries, while technology moves in years. They are not compliant with each other.
[0] One of the reasons that the loss of the headphone jack is so exasperating, is that's an example of an ideal universal connector; it solved the problem so well, there was little reason to improve on it, either in quality or function.
But the legislation doesn't lock into something that might happen in the future. It locks the future to what we have today.
And in fact, they did. By the time I was reaching adulthood, that was that hard limit built into Win95, give or take boot errors if you had a quarter of that (which was gigantic at the time; 64MB was more than enough to boot it).
Fast forward another 25 years to today, and laptops routinely have 16GB of RAM, and higher end Mac Pros can apparently get a whopping 1.5TB of RAM.
Put another way, the high-end went from .1MB to 1TB in 40 years or so.
I get that we're reaching the physical limits of miniaturization, but I'd still be surprised if my grand kids don't have exabytes of RAM or equivalent on whatever the hell their main devices will be by the time they reach adulthood.
Things change or evolve, and often in ways not foreseen.
https://www.amazon.com/Charger-AYNGWRNB-Certified-Lightning-...
"If Rolex's cost $6,000+, how come I can buy one in the Bronx for $20?" "It's probably not real." "I bought it, it works."
I entirely get what you're saying. But the chip is counterfeit, so the company doesn't pay the licensing cost, that's why the cable is "so cheap". Nothing to do with audiophile-esque tendencies. More that your 5 pack of cables would cost $14+(5*$4, the current license price) if it were that way.
No-one's disputing that you can buy cheap cables that will work (until they don't, because who knows what else was skimped on), just that you don't in any way shape or form have Apple to thank for that, it's entirely _in spite of_ Apple.
It’s amazing that the same people who are worried about not having genuine Apple certified cables are probably the same people who want Apple to open up the iPhone to allow side loading.
Shouldn’t in that case Apple lock down cables more?
On one one hand, everyone is arguing that Apple’s proprietary cables are cynical attempt to make money and they shouldn’t have that control and people should have the choice.
Now I am showing you they already have that choice.
> What do you think is going to happen when you buy cheap USB C cables?
I can buy licensed USB-C cables from reputable brands for cheaper than I can buy licensed Lightning cables from reputable brands. And the USB-C cables are more complex to manufacture. One example is Amazon Basics.
> Now I am showing you they already have that choice.
People will always have the choice to buy anything as long as cash exists. But if you want to buy something that is quality, you will look to a reputable brand. A reputable brand will be economically successful, so it is a target for lawsuits, so they will always enter a license. If the license for Lighting costs more than the license for USB, then a consumer who wants to buy a quality cable will always pay more.
Are you saying that politicians should be designing technical standards? And how will you ever know there is a need for a new standard if you can't even deploy it?
It's not like this is something new. We've had national standards for things like AC power plugs and outlets for over a century, and they are mandatory in many countries.
It also is just a charger, they can do whatever they want with data.
There's 3 parts that I can see to a wired charging situation:
1. the device to be charged 2. something that takes "house" power and does whatever is necessary to convert it for charging purposes 3. a cable between them
It seems to me (who doesn't even own a phone, hah, what an idiot) that (2) already exists in the form of things that plugin to a wall socket and offer 1 or more USB A sockets.
The does leave room for cable waste, as it only pins down 1 end of the cable.
What are we really discussing here?
It's really quite bad.
One of the primary motivations cited relates to waste and recycling - however chargers represent an utterly minuscule component of individual waste.
A much better approach from a waste management perspective would be to require that all electronics gear be 'processed' (like batteries). The price of the product 'pre includes' the cost of post-processing, so when it's picked up in its special recycling category, the bit of labour is taken care of.
In fact - this could be applied to a wide variety of products.
As for 'charging standard' - this can only work if it's led by a really smart body, nimble enough to enable innovation and adaptatio, and it's most certainly not the legislative body. The EU could 'empower' such a working group, but should not be getting into the details.
Of course - this legislation will be hacked immediately - everyone will not sell funky multi-adapter chargers with proprietary bits connected to the standard bits. I don't doubt for one second Apple's ability to 'sell you more crap'.
Finally - Apple uses mostly fairly standard stuff. I have a Samsung that uses a far-flung USB kind of standard I've never seen elsewhere. Apple has actually been focusing on USB-C pretty well on their own.
In summary: these kinds of rulings fundamentally do not belong at the level of the legal draft - they belong in standards bodies. They will not solve the problems they are intended to solve, and will simply accrue more overhead for everyone in the EU. Solving issues of sustainability and recycling etc. should be one elsewhere and likely requires some bigger picture thinking.
Everyone shouts about GDPR but fines are something like the 3rd or 4th stage of the remedy process - up until that point the regulator is working with you and no punishment of any kind has occurred. Of course since the GDPR is at an EU level, individual member states could opt to jail people for violations - I couldn't find any examples of that, however.
On the other hand, finding a different connector and cable when you eventually buy a new phone is seamless.
But: imagine what we might have gotten stuck with if this law had been implemented 10-20 years ago.
I'm not deadset against this sort of thing, and I think we could do a lot worse than USB-C as the new universal connector (at least for the next decade or so), but given past attempts at regulating tech (cookie banners), I think it's a legitimate concern.
The only debatable advantages to Lightning are in the physical form factor, but that's hard to quantify (you mostly hear anecdotes "my USB-C port is a bit loose after 6 months" which could just come down to manufacturing quality rather than the design of the port itself)
I see companies like Motorola, LG, Kyocera, and Nintendo as more abusive. Sell a few tens of millions of devices ,(not 100M a year) and still, use a custom proprietary charging cable and transformer, soldered together in 1 piece so it hits the dumpster in 1-2Y when the cable frays!
So, what prevents Apple from offering lightning connector as a common EU standard? :) Problem solved!
The EU has tended to this kind of thing for a long time now, overriding its opinions of how things should be "standardised" over the top of liberty. Makes sense if you think about it: given its nature as an institution, its modus operandi is to "standardize" and "make uniform", as a core expression of its sovereignty over what is a highly heterogeneous territory.
Fortunately though, Apple will be around much longer than it will.
let's just hope Macron's push for an EU refresh come sooner rather than later. because it's not normal looking more towards the UK removing a bunch of these regulations than looking forward to yet another round of EU bureaucrats messing everything up.
Still, the irony of Apple complaining about being forced to adopt a standard when they’ve been at the vanguard of aggressively dropping older ports is amusing.
Is it? Nearly every big industry player hates being regulated to make a decision they didn’t make.
They already do multiple versions for radios (GSM vs CDMA) so I can’t imagine this would be a terrible challenge for them other than losing lightening cable licensing fees.
Yeah right, and next year? What do we do next year? Will we just wait for regulators to approve a new way of doing things every 100 million years?
And once again Europeans try to protect consumers, while U.S. “representatives” abet corporations in ripping them off.
If there's anything that needs to be standardized it's the port which is used to charge the device. That port, today, should be USB-C. But the law doesn't do that.
I'm no fan of Apple,and frankly, I find it gratifying that someone is pushing them around - something Apple routinely does to entities that aren't as powerful, but regulating chargers in the name of __insert_populist_reason__ is just way too authoritarian by the EU. Please go solve real problems
This is a step toward solving that, and thus, they are solving real problems.
If I could ubiquitously charge my mobile devices anywhere with gear built into my surroundings, I’d likely never need future charging cables or hardware.
You lose some electrical efficiency but gain a reduction in physical hardware churn.
Also, presently anyway, wireless charging generally has power limits on the order of 5 watts, while the USB 3 PD spec allows for up to 100. A modern mobile phone pulls more than 5 watts from a wall charger, so mandating wireless charging would also result in a short-term charging time increase. They're also not as easy to transport and use anywhere (e.g. on a train with a power socket but without a tray table). Many people would find that unacceptable.
My Nexus 5 had wireless charging, I had that phone for more than 3 years, and I never got to use it before it died and I upgraded to a 6P, which doesn't have it.
I would like to see clean solutions in coffee shops and on trains for Qi charging to enable the most common use cases of course.
Sooner that rabble gets overthrown the better. One domino has fallen now, hope the rest follow in short order.
Is government regulation of non-goverment tech illegitimate? That would be most all regulation then.
When USB-C is superior for using on phones, then I'm OK with it. But right now it's just exchanging one plug for another because a bunch of bureaucrats say so.
Does this mean in 20 years we'll still be stuck with USB-C instead of something better because just Brussels says so?
We're quite lucky no PC manufacturer managed to get as big as Apple is today back in the 80s-90s. There's no way we would have universal RAM, universal Keyboards, universal Video Cards, etc, etc, today, if that was the case.
No. I am not locked into the Apple ecosystem. Having two cables enables me to charge two devices at the same time, no?
Are you going to make me list out every scenario that is doubled?
Standardization is a fantastic reason. Hundreds of millions of people have to switch to new cables, chargers, adapters, and devices every once in a while anyway, and if that never happened, these products would not have advanced. Progress is good. You may argue the environmental point, but there's no reason to connect that with this transition and not the many others.
2. Lightning is not a standard like USB-C, but is (subjectively) much nicer, as others in this thread have pointed out.
Standardization and open standards are big deals to the kind of person who reads Hacker News, but I can absolutely guarantee you that if/when the iPhone actually moves to USB-C, we will be flooded with hot takes about how that shift is just another money-grubbing move by Greedy Evil Apple to make us all have to buy new cables and/or dongles.
With USB-C there's no real reason to have other standards for charging a cell phone.
And with that out of the way, manufacturers can focus on developing a universal wireless charging protocol.
Reasons to have other standards exist because they are better than USB-C. I’ve got a lightning port on my current phone, while my old phone was USB-C, as well as my current laptop and tablet both USB-C. I have to say, the lightning feels significantly more secure.
Also, we have a standard for wireless charging. Qi has been around for years. Old Nexus used to have it. New iPhones do have it. IKEA even sells cheap furniture with chargers built in.
I'll take lightning over usb-c anyday. I currently have a pixel 3 and it does not connect half the time and yes, I clean out the stupid port with a toothpick even though I never had to do that with an iphone.
Android auto is especially annoying as a slight bump can cause it to disconnect and then it takes like 20 seconds to get it back running with the map on the dashboard.
The stupid headphone jack connector also sucks because the only way I can work out with it is if I use 2 rubber bands to pull the usb-c to headphone jack connector tight constantly or else the slightest movement in my pocket will disconnect it.
Cheaper lesser quality cables are the issue. Buy a 99c gas station Lightning cable and see how well it works for you.
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Philips-Charging-Compatible-DLC5206BA...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WFHNFSD/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...