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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

Why is this “have to pass through bureaucrats” narrative pushed on every single discussion about this topic ?

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 ?

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Because anyone with experience with the political process knows it’s an absolute nightmare and prone to being extremely slow to react to changes.

Is charging port technology something we want to be the wild wild west and have companies quickly push random designs ?

Up until now the real nightmare has been every company coming up with their own crappy connector and sticking with it for decades.

USB-C is not the final form of charger ports. I’d rather the debate on the next evolution happen within industry, and maybe even play out competitively in the market. If a clear victor emerged and there’s another large, abusive hold out like Apple, then just pass a similar time-limited law.

This is way too dismissive of the govs attitude, which is to reevaluate the situation every X years, and way too optimistic toward the industry, which couldn’t converge to anything without getting forced to do it. The “clear victor” only emerged because of the law passed.

For crying out loud, USB-C was created by Apple and look at the situation we’re still in.

What? USB-C won aside from one holdout. Apple wasn’t even trying to get other companies to adopt Lightning.

It won because the legislative interfered. Apple just couldn't be bothered to play ball while it wasn't outright mandated, which is why we're now in this shitty situation.

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.

Apple have already said they’ll introduce it

You’re misinformed. they said they’ll adhere to the regulation, and the regulation only requires usb-c if a physical charging port is available.

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.

Apparently Apple is even slower than the slow bureaucrats

Your comment misses the point of the entire discussion. No one has even claimed that Apple was merely slow. It was pure profit motive.

Isn’t it worse ?

How do you suggest to have some control over pure profit motives then?

By eventually doing what the EU is doing when there’s a clear hold out. But instead of carving it in stone, letting it expire in 5 to 10 years. i.e. exactly what my original comment said.

Outside wartime, being slow is an advantage. It means citizens can trust rules won’t be changed rapidly, increasing trust in the government. If properly taxes often change citizens wouldn’t know whether they can afford to buy a house, for example, or whether they be able to pay for their kids to go to school.

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...)

Slow is good for deciding to prohibit. Slow is bad for deciding to allow.

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