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Comment by throwaway50606 | Hacker News Reader

EU is the second largest market in the world. Of course everything is going to be made in a way that's sellable in the EU.

> Also, you are not banned from engineering other solutions. The police isn't going to knock on the doors of engineers who are suspected to develop better charging cables :)

We are discussing under an article where the regulator has sent a "stern warning" to a company. I don't think what you're saying makes sense. If I tried to sell my better plug in my home market, the police would come knocking.

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You mean like how EU-compatible AC plugs/voltages are sold everywhere else in the world? Of course, manufacturers can have different versions of things for different geos--or just not sell in the EU if it's not profitable to do so (which presumably won't be the case with the iPhone).

EU exists 10% of the time the electrical plugs existed and were regulated in the respective countries.

We are talking about new innovations, not something used for 100 years.

No they wouldn't, because you are not a giant corporation like Apple. Stop assuming your scrappy little startup and a trillion-$ corporation with massive market share have similar interests, this is like an ant worrying about a fence designed to block elephants.

In reality if you come up with some kind of better plug, you will sell to a specialist market that would recognize the benefits (dentists or musicians for example) and then expand into other markets. You could try selling direct to consumers but guess what, nobody would buy it unless it had connectivity with other devices, and manufacturers wouldn't go out of their way to adopt it unless it delivered overwhelming advantages at low additional cost.

Not necessarily. If you come up with such a superior plug, you can easily have it sold on the 1st largest market in the world.

Not everything has to be sold in EU, there are plenty of things not available across all markets.

No, I can't. I need to sell it on both markets to make it profitable. There's no way to have that large margins it could sell just in the US.

If you need to sell it on both markets and can't have two production lines, I guess your product will have USB-C port and your superior charging port, like the new MacBooks having type-C and magsafe.

And that's supposed to be good? I really don't understand this world...

Having three computers of different brands in the family (an HP, a Lenovo and a Microsoft Surface), it's certainly been useful in the past to be able to share a single charging port for all computers and most phones in the family.

In fact, USB-C and magsafe are complementary. USB-C is commonly used by displays to provide docking station functionality, so I can buy any display and use it with any computer (instead of having to buy a proprietary docking station that is different for each model). If I'm travelling, I can enjoy the more robust magsafe connector but I can also use USB-C if needed.

It's good because until you invent this new cable, we can have everything work with USB-C.

Not betting on your ability to come up with a new type of charging cable is not as big deal as you imagining it is. Maybe you should come up with a prototype before demanding all type of charging cables be allowed?

And what do I do with the prototype then? There's nobody buying.

This probably means your invention don't add enough value. Throw it away like all other prototypes who fail to create enough value to warrant a production line.

No, it means somebody regulated a single connector type.

I guess all failed inventors and entrepreneurs have someone to blame.

Nobody is even going to be trying after this comes into effect.

IF you can't be profitable at anything other than global scale, maybe your (wholly hypothetical) invention is not that great.

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