It’s not misbehavior by Apple if it’s to protect against 3rd party misbehavior.
If there's such a huge pool of potential trouble brewing with a 20W phone, why do they even allow such maleficent third party malfeasance?
/s
... which is roughly what's being proposed here for iPhone. Since some Samsung devices charge at 45W and require 3A (hence e-marked) cables, one can infer Apple wants to do something similar for iPhone in the future.
Edit: I should add that it is possible for a fully complaint combination of devices to not charge at max(sink power, source power), because not all possible combinations of voltage and current may be supported. For example a 60W charger may support 20V@3A, but if the 60W sink only supports 12V charging, it needs 5A and this combination won't support 60W charging. In practice this should be rare though, it would be terrible product design.
Re: your edit. There is this exact kind of profile incompatibility between the Leviton T5636 and the HomePod mini when two devices are plugged in. The outlet should support 30W for each receptacle, which is more than enough to provide the 18W/20W the HomePod mini requires. But for some PD profile incompatibility reason (9V/3A probably), it does not get enough power.
And it is in fact terrible product design. Leviton is pointing the finger at Apple but in reality, who knows.
IMO it's harder for the source to be flexible with voltage, and especially current limit, so I'd put somewhat more blame on the sink here for not being flexible enough. Generally a sink should expect to be plugged into an 'unknown' source, so should at least make an effort to support multiple voltages.
Designing a multiport power source with a shared power limit is a bit of a tricky problem.
I can assure you that counterfeit Thunderbolt cables don't work at Thunderbolt speeds.
Also, power delivery is defined by USB standards, not Thunderbolt.
> I'm going to contend this isn't so much subverting EU rules but rather trying to ensure that Apple won't get blamed when someone uses a cable that can't handle the power when plugged in given that there's not a good standard out there for this and no enforcement of the "ok, there's something - try this..."
Two questions:
1. (Given Apple fanboy view of world, then) why can I charge an Apple laptop with a random USB-C cable?
2. Why would that logic not apply to iPhones too?
> (Given Apple fanboy view of world, then) why can I charge an Apple laptop with a random USB-C cable?
Not that I appreciate the tone here, but yes, you could charge an Apple laptop with what you would call "random" USB-C cable, as long as it delivers the necessary wattage. That is not the issue at hand, though.
> Why would that logic not apply to iPhones too?
It could.
But there are orders of magnitude more phones than laptops, and laptop users tend to use, well, their laptop chargers for the most part. Still, I have seen one or two laptop motherboards essentially melted, because they were overdrawing power.
By the way, I never argued that Apple should create a new standard, or a new certification program. What I originally said was that I wish that Apple would prevent cables that are not PD compliant from working with their devices, because USB-IF sucks at enforcing this.