Seriously, before this law was put in place, Europe had been asking companies to agree on a common charging port for more than a decade.
The first Memorandum of Understanding on the subject was signed in 2009. Amusingly Apple did sign it before deciding to simply ignore it. That was followed by a directive in 2014 and an impact assessment in 2018.
Despite these repeated warnings, Apple spent the decade lobbying against a common port while collecting a tidy sum with the Made For Iphone initiative.
The EU didn’t mandate by hubris. It just had to. We need a law because if we don’t have one there will always be companies reverting to proprietary ports. They just can’t resist the easy money.
We would have been stuck with micro USB for eternity if it wasn't for Apple. I realise they may not have objected out of the kindness of their hart, but good thing they did.
Amending laws takes much less time than eternity. Lawmakers are people, they can process information and make changes when appropriate. You can be sure that the industry will not forget to remind them when a change seems sensible.
Most of Europe already has a standard 230V plug (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schuko). It would probably be easier to get a unified 230V power plug than to change the USB-C port again after a decade.
“Until 1987, mains voltage in large parts of Europe, including Germany, Austria and Switzerland, was 220(±22)V while the UK used 240(±24)V. Standard ISO IEC 60038:1983 defined the new standard European voltage to be 230(±23)V.”
Why?
Because either a new standard is not allowed. Or it is allowed, but then highly probably just one… and the central planning way. One standard/product is worked on, one is accepted as the successo.
No selection in the wild of the one that survives (depending of what we talk about, the survivor is sometimes the one that is technically better, sometimes it is the one that is cheaper, or faster in bandwith or latency or prettier, or …).
This sometimes work ok for 1-2 successors, but the more times pass by, the more central planing (or lack of free market) fails.
If one is very honest it has to see both sides of it.
Both has their pros and cons (not equally weighted though).
The regulated way has to be done as rarely as possible (very hard to decide when it is a good idea…)
Aside from Apple, the voluntary standards process was working. No one else was still resisting USB-C. Can you name some examples?
USB-C is not royalty-free, either.
I don't think it's too expensive if you consider the environment impact not to mention the bad user experience caused by multiple chargers. I also believe at certain point the economies of scale should make it less expensive.
It would be so much nicer if we got one standard that covers everything.
And my latest trimmer is actually using micro-USB, though with an additional plastic plug preventing the use of the charger on another device. But I can charge the trimmer with any other Micro-USB charger.
Implemented with durable materials and good machining practices, USB C can last a lifetime of plug cycles. The standard lends itself to extremely durable design relative even to the tank that is USB A. The C standard is for 10,000 cycles, but this is only technically a minimum. USB A only specifies 1,500 technically, but A connectors have been manufactured that last 20,000. This all alludes to the idea that USB C is just a standard, and it doesn’t indicate exactly how the connector is designed.
The situation with bandwidth is similar. Bandwidth has many other bottlenecks. The speed with which data is written to a flash drive, for example, has nothing to do with the port itself anymore. Similarly to the durability issue, it’s going to be a long long time before the functionality of USB C is associated with more than 80 GB/s.
One one hand getting approval for a specific justifiable situation doesn’t seem like an issue for any company with enough means to design a better universal connector.
On the other hand these “bureaucrats” are presently updating these laws as the previous one became obsolete and the situation isn’t improving organically. Here the bad player is Apple, why are we pointing the finger at the orgs actually making things move and keeping up to date with technology ?
I think the EU is a great example of politics that’s slow, but not too slow, and not a nightmare. Yes, this took years, and the discussions probably weren’t all good, but the end result is decent, and that’s what counts.
Other examples are RoHS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...), the GDPR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...), and roaming regulations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_roaming_regulat...)
Up until now the real nightmare has been every company coming up with their own crappy connector and sticking with it for decades.
For crying out loud, USB-C was created by Apple and look at the situation we’re still in.
And as mkbhd said a while ago, it's extremely unlikely that apple will introduce USB-C now as well. They'll likely pivot to wireless charging exclusively and get rid of all external connectors.
A lot of news outlets took that as confirmation, but it was never explicitly stated.
We’ll see in 2024 if Apple chooses to remove the connector altogether or switch to usb-c. My money is on the removal.
very strange reading this since i still buy electrical devices produced in 2022 with micro-usb, custom plugs, or whatever was cheapest when they assembled the device.
Because manufacturers would immediately resort to proprietary ones to squeeze some more money from customers for cables, chargers, adapters etc. If you look at them more as consumables than part of the product, just like printer cartridges, that makes more sense. Nobody is preventing future innovators from adding their own port with more features where space and cost would permit that.
And if the user registers for an account then they can be informed as part of the signup because it's a technical necessity to maintain a login, again no banner needed.
For storing more than that and especially for handing user data off to greedy advertisement leeches you must ask for user consent.
When asking user for consent, opting out must be as easy as opting in. If the user opted out, the site must continue to provide functionality.
Literally not what the law says.
- The ePrivacy Directive from 2002 (!) is (in its opt-in part) about sites storing stuff by whatever mechanism on the user’s computer (not just cookies, despite its nickname of “cookie law”). The explanatory text allows the “storage or GTFO” approach you are referring to. No mention is made of deletion of data, as the directive is purely about client-side storage, and the user can presumably delete that. Any storage technically required for the site to operate (e.g. login cookies) is specifically exempted, it need not even be mentioned.
I would not say this turned out particularly useful, but, well, in 2002 Microsoft was publishing books on .NET thick clients with chapters on interoperability with COM+ distributed transactions and SOAP was the hot new thing not even in Recommendation status yet. Nobody can see the future all that well, large organizations especially.
(I understand a more useful update to that has been stalled by GAFAM lobbying efforts for years now.)
- The General Data Protection Regulation from 2016 (not a typo, there was a generous grace period) is about organizations tracking people through whatever means. The “tracking or GTFO” choice (or its close relative, “tracking, money, or GTFO”, as seen e.g. on French newspaper sites even today) is explicitly illegal, though of course showing ads with no tracking is not in scope. As the tracking data is stored by the organization, the user can demand that it be deleted. Any tracking technically required for the organization to operate (e.g. lists of customers who have used their free trial) is specifically exempted to the extent that the requirement exists (e.g. as long as the free trial is offered).
This one is working out better, although there seem to be tricky international law issues (“directive” vs “regulation”, jurisdiction etc) that mean that enforcement is less efficient that it could have been (e.g. Google and Facebook have mainly been prosecuted via ePD, as the GDPR complaints have to be routed through the Irish authorities, who have jammed their fingers into their ears and gone “lalala can’t hear you”).