I don't understand why Apple are dragging their heels on this so much
I get people want to do the whole “<XYZ Company> is evil” but at least get the basics of the argument right.
Apple are dragging their feet because one form of Apple tax is going away.
And Apple a luxury in 2023, really? Competition phones are more expensive and loaded with better hardware, some look significantly better (cough notch cough), Apple also has budget phones... I don't think you understand the term luxury if you include current Apple into it. Louis Vuitton is an example of luxury brand. Apple is alternative to Android or Windows for laptops, thats it.
- headphones
- displays
- "gas station" chargers (for when you leave yours at home and just need something cheap)
- memory card readers
These are just the ones I own.
I cant imagine Apple would be risking huge fines for the EU for the 10 people who plug SD cards in to their phone.
And Apple is pushing for new vehicles to use CarPlay wirelessly anyway.
Amazon and eBay are flooded with fakes that can be life threateningly dangerous. I can see why some people prefer to buy from Apple rather than figuring out what brands are actually not going to burn your house down.
But I've always struggled to believe that revenue from licencing or direct sales of Lightning connectors is that big a deal to Apple. I think their insistence on using their own connector is more about product differentiation and lock-in than about revenue and performance.
Had Apple changed for USB-C at the time, or USB mini, it would have made the same positive press as when the Macbook Pro got back to normal (ie not “Here’s a single port for everything, go buy an Apple dongle if you want to plug a screen”).
USB was _awful_ at that point.
The switch to USB C wasn't the primary issue. The main complaint was that the laptop only had two ports: a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a single USB C for everything else. The previous iteration had 6.
People were angry that they were being forced to buy a hub if they fell into the ultra niche use case of wanting to charge while using any kind of peripheral at all.
Thinking about it, most USB hubs came with USB-A ports. I wonder if we'd have seen USB-A die off more rapidly if Apple had included a sensible number of ports on the Macbook.
The 2016 Macbook Air[0] was not the first in the series. The lack of ports was controversial due to it differing from the previous 2015 model[1].
.... and as far as I can tell USB-C is a shitshow of an ecosystem anyway. This entire article could just be saying that Apple devices could charge "slower" on random USB-C cables and only guarantee fast charging on Apple-branded cables....
... which sounds like Apple being anticompetitive if you know nothing about the state of the USB-C ecosystem.
Europe actually has some teeth. Playing dumb when Europe tells you "try me" is a sure way to be banned out of the common market.
>And there is no way for the EU to appear credible and restrict this.
And yet here we are.
It all remains to be seen, some EU Joe random hotshot issuing warnings is no more than that, warnings. If any action is to come from the EU side, it’ll be after years and years of legal wrangling and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Apples lawyers end up outsmarting some pompous EU councilman.
It's probably moot because Apple seems to be moving to USB-C over all their product lines anyway. But if the EU were to mandate something that Apple felt was a materially inferior choice, I'd fully expect them to comply where they had to and implement a different option everywhere else.
GDPR is simply a case of, if a company doesn't have a compelling reason for not following GDPR where possible, it's just easier to follow mostly uniform rules worldwide.
Sure, you go on and keep believing that :)