Edit: One of the companies has a slightly less obnoxious website which also lists brands[1]
Metabo (the one I know for their powertools, though Fischer is famous for their dowels and Edding for their markers) is known for drills as well as gardening power tools. I think this is more a non-consumer area (though Metabo certainly dabbles in consumer devices)
The only name I recognize there is Bosch, I've never had any of their tools but my perception is that they are a mid-tier brand. It would be great to see players like DeWalt, Milwaukee, and Makita do something like this.
Also, I've mentioned this on hn before, there is already the Cordless Alliance, which does exactly this.
Sadly, there's only a couple of useful-in-a-mainstream-sense brands in there: Mafell and Metabo. The rest are very niche.
Good on Metabo for doing it, and good on Mafell for signing up to use them. The smaller brands it's a no-brainer I guess.
Personally I'd be happy for that situation because of the big upside, but I can see why a company would not want it.
Plus, the most logical thing to do is not make a new standard, but pick an existing one. But who gets to be the golden brand whose battery system remains unchanged?
I would love it to happen but I can't see it happening for a while.
The first one to make all relevant patents & designs available royalty-free.
Perhaps part of a battery standardisation push could include making these available at a reasonable price.
Ryobi should not be praised for failure to innovate. They did not do this out of a desire to preserve compatibility, but rather out of cheapness.
Ryobi products are low end but they have innovated plenty while maintaining compatibility. Given that TTI has access to the pro market via other brands, and Ryobi geared for homeowners, I don't see this as anything but a win for the average Ryobi customer.
I have cordless tools across a number of battery platforms and while it's convenient when they can be shared, it's ultimately not a big deal to have a few if another company makes a better tool. Tradespeople won't lock themselves in if the right tool is on a different platform.
Right, but home users will. I have 5 Ryobi One+ batteries, so there's no way I'll buy a battery-operated tool from a different brand, even if the tool itself is better/cheaper than the equivalent Ryobi product.
>Right, but home users will.
The charger cost about £70 and the 3 batteries I have were a similar price, each. So, for me, changing brands for a particular tool would mean an outlay of 'Price of Tool' + 'Price of Charger' + Price of n Batteries' which just isn't worth it, unless the rival company's tool was 2 or 3 times as good as the Makita offering.
I've sometimes thought that maybe Metabo, DeWalt or Milwaukee's version of a certain tool I wanted was slightly better than Makita's one. But, as I say, not twice or three times as good, to justify that kind of outlay.
So, like quite a few people commenting here, I'm kind of stuck with supporting the blue team now --even when they occasionally get outplayed by their opponents.
There's a reason Milwaukee, Makita, DeWalt, AEG, and Bosch, are wildly popular.
They're almost entirely indistinguishable. We also have some Hilti branded cordless tools, also fine.
My personal preference for home use is something like Ryobi One+ or Ozito PXC (less than half the price of the One+) because I'm actually at work all day using power and cordless tools supplied by work, I don't plan on taking my home tools to three or four hundred commercial construction sites or building 1000 houses with them.
Tool brand preference is, in my opinion, largely a sport-like
That means every device manufacturer will claim, even if the law requires that devices must all have the same plug, that a competitors device drew too much current, or charged their battery too fast/too slow/at too a low a temperature, and thats why performance sucks.
In reality, these technical problems could be solved - but device manufacturers will make the small hurdle into a big one when explaining why they can't all standardize.
Many of the packs that I've seen the inside of has balancing circuitry included.
Also worth considering these packs are charged separate from the tool. So this means the tool cannot control the charge rate etc.
Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts. This suspicion is amplified when you consider that some of these brands are made by the same company.
(probably less-than-average usage patterns as we are lazy house owners; stored inside, not abused)
>Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts
I'd like to see the EU designate a common battery interface for all newly manufactured tools & batteries. That way we could buy the best tool for the job each time, instead of being locked into using whatever the Blue, Yellow, Red or Green team are fielding in that area.
The manufacturers would doubtless also produce their own adaptors to allow their existing tools & batteries to work with this new 'One Interface to Rule Them All'
All of the large format packs have pins for each cell, so charging with a standard balance charger is pretty easy. You can find plenty of schematics for homemade controllers online. Where they differ however, are the other pins. Some use a communication protocol like SMBUS. Some have dedicated pins for specific things like overcurrent or temperature. It varies highly from manufacturer to manufacturer.
AFAIK, all tool brands are moving to communication protocols for the packs.
[EDIT] Someone mentioned adapters. I don't believe there are adapters that support newer communicating packs (e.g. the OEM chargers won't work with the adapter). Older packs are all analog, so conversion is just a simple matter of rerouting the pins.
We should all be glad that didn't happen with micro-USB or some of the worse connectors years ago, because we would still be stuck with them. USB-C was innovated by the market, not by EU bureaucrats.
Curious/out of the loop: any (unbiased?) examples?
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
Europe needs to make sure these tech giants get to keep just enough money that they don't pull out of europe entirely, but not much more.
Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.
One such law for example forbids fake reviews.
Google creates profiles for small businesses, invites everyone to anonymously say whatever they want about business and rate it.
Then they list advertisement from competitors next to it.
Their solution for the public shaming contest is that you should send more <s>customers</s> people to google to review your business and of course purchase adds.
The law says that if you want to do reviews of any kind you must be able to prove the review is from someone who purchased a product or service. The fines are in % of global revenue. Google could have some legal talking point if they allowed business to disable it.
We didn't know wont fly.
>Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?
I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?
Probably because I work in tech in the US, but that has not been my view.
What was the fine that the EU put on VW for intentionally cheating on emissions standards? And how does that compare with the many fines Google has gotten?
Not that it's relevant to Google...
EU regulator powers operate with an honestly fairly limited scope based on the laws passed by parliament and the commission. There's no EPA like organisation with broad powers to persue companies for most forms of misbehaviour like there is in the US - that's left to the member states, with countries like Germany and Italy individually prosecuting Volkswagen executives for fraud.
The difference with GDPR and anti-trust violations is that the EU has been deliberately granted the power to exact severe fines on companies for each individual offence. If post-scandal Volkswagen had been caught falsifying emissions again and again (similiar to Google's repeated GDPR violations) they might have been hit with more and more fines of the severity that Google has.
Like VW had an unfair advantage over other (non-EU) car companies because they didn't meet the standards.
The reality is that they didn't want to hurt VW that much because it is an important EU company. Same reason the US fined the crap out of them -- but would have been lenient on Ford in the same circumstances.
This is normal stuff. I was just responding to the idea that the EU was "too soft" on US tech companies.
Not everything in this world revolves around you.
We have a ton of VC capital. Can we use this to price dump our way into the market or to do slightly illegal or very illegal things covered in great UI/UX/XD so that some consumers are our own side, and by the time they ban us, we're too big too fail and fines we get are lower than our profits?
Examples: Uber, Airbnb, LinkedIn, ...
Although it's not the most important thing in the world, forcing standardization through law is the opposite of giving consumers choices.
Standardisation of the former means we don't have to have half a dozen sockets on the wall because every domestic appliance manufacturer uses a different design plug... or have each of those sockets provide a different voltage because every appliance manufacturer opted for a different voltage.
Standardisation of the latter leads to waiting 15 years for your Trabant.
Case in point: The enforced standardising of mobile phone chargers has given consumers more choice of chargers to use with their phone. Thas proven quite useful in practice, e.g. when they leave the one that came with their device at home because they didn't expect to need it, or when the manufacturer's own brand is more expensive than an alternative, or if they have an old phone.
I remember before USB-C standardised phone power, when visiting someone the chance that they had a power supply you could use was very low, because each one used a different connector. Even different models from the same brand. If you went travelling at short notice, you might have to buy a second charger just to keep you going for a few days. That's no longer required. Over the years you would end up with a box full of incompatible chargers, all e-waste. I think I have about 10.
This particular consumer benefit didn't happen voluntarily among manufacturers (unlike, say, SIM cards), so forcing it has increased consumer choice in some useful respects.
I prefer Apple's lightning connector (even though I don't have an iPhone), and other connectors better than USB-C would surely emerge if allowed to, so I do see benefits in not enforcing a standard like that too strictly. But the situation before USB-C mobile power was less consumer choice not more, for consumers of almost every phone.
You gain choice of charger to use with your phone, which most people do want, especially when outside their home.
You will still have phones that come with “standard USB C” cables where some support different power delivery, data speeds (or not support data transfer at all), very few will support video over USB C (which is standardized), etc.
So still when the Android user with the cheap power only USB C cord moves over to the hypothetical iPhone 15 with USB C, they will still have to throw away their USB C cable that potentially doesn’t support high speed data or video over USB C. Both supported by todays iPads with USB C.
If the same mandate had gone through when it was first proposed, we would have been stuck with micro USB.
Except that it's still a perfectly fine cable for charging, which is what most people do with their cables?
If iPhone users were satisfied with the least common denominator, they would be buying cheap Android phones.
The lowest common denominator is the same reason that Bluetooth outside of the Apple ecosystem is such a shit show.
Android has supported its own proprietary video over micro USB for ages before USB C became more ubiquitous. What are the chances that Android manufactures won’t cheap out and not ship with cables that can support video over USB?
and I am probably overestimating by order of magnitude.
Most people shoot photos and show them to their friends online. Some of them even share it through sites like Instagram and Facebook or WhatsApp and similar.
And that is where it ends for most normal people.
As long as the cable can charge the phone, it will do for the most buyers.
I know the "standard setup" shown in media, and advertisements, etc shows a ring light with a cellphone using the front facing camera as the recording device, that's just not technologically feasible.
And for the record, i move 4k and/or 108MP images from my phones via wifi or cellular, using synology diskstation autosync or syncthing, respectively. I've used syncthing to upload unedited 4k30p drone footage with no issues, and when i get home, it will sync to hard disks in addition.
Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?
You're letting perfect be the enemy of good here.
Also I think the ideal endgame is that your Beats Flex headphones don't come with cables at all because of standardization. Look at Apple (and most phone manufacturers) no longer packaging chargers.
And even the cheapest power only USB cables with the cheapest USB power supply provides "standard" 5V power. If your device doesn't accept that, isn't that a problem with your Macbook and not the cable?
The USB standard is fine until the unsuspecting consumer who left the USB C cord to his MacBook Pro 16 goes to a random drug store to pick up a standard “USB C” cable and wonders why their laptop is still going dead after a few hours of heavy use not knowing the cord is incapable of delivering 100W of power.
Or the hypothetical iPhone 16 user goes to the same store because he wants to watch video on his TV and buys a “standard” USB C cable and finds out that the cable doesn’t support video over USB C - which is part of the standard.
Not to mention the unsuspecting tourist who wants to back up the pictures and video from his phone to his computer so he won’t incur roaming charges and finds out the USB C cable he purchased is power only.
Basic cables support 60.
It's unfortunate when cables don't say their Gbps, but that's a different issue.
Most likely yes, unless it's a non-compliant cable in the first place, and possibly at a reduced speed (60W max).
>Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?
Ignoring that iPhones don't have USB C, yes to both at the fastest charge rate available.
Only times where you have to worry about a cable with USB-C when charging is if charging power exceeds 60W or the cable is optical. Above 60W you need marked cables, some go up to 100W, and some (will, not seen in the wild yet) go up to 240W. There are plans to deprecate the 100W tier as well.
You'll notice weirdness with anything that speaks a different language, i think USB defaults to power delivery, which is 5V @ 2.5A - or whatever. If your charger speaks the same protocol as your device, it will get as much power as it can through whatever cable you use.
this doesn't speak to other comments about "high speed USB C" - i have plenty of power delivery cables that do decent wattage but cannot transfer data, it doesn't even beep the computer when you plug something in to it.