This feels that it’s banking on USB-C being forever future proofed or wireless connections does everything we ever need.
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?
[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.
"[...] 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.
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 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.