Hacker News Reader

Comment by GrantMoyer | Hacker News Reader

As a US citizen, thanks Europe for regulating our businesses.

Designed in America. Made in China. Regulated in Europe.

Well, it worked for USB-C and GDPR (which spirit was implemented in other non-EU countries as well). Look up: “Brussels effect”.

Also RoHS. After a token period of insisting that RoHS would cause the end of the world, manufacturers complied, and after a few years some even found that producing non-toxic products for Europe and toxic products for everywhere else was impractical, going globally non-toxic. Usually presenting this as something they were doing out of the goodness of their hearts; you may remember Apple making a big deal about dropping lead and mercury and similar about a decade back.

It is not like electronic waste has not increased and the RoHS products are are not toxic. /s

You always throw out the baby with the bathwater?

I think the only major hardware issue I've heard attributed to RoHS was some of the errors with xbox 360s because microsoft weren't great at using lead free solder yet. Though, I didn't go looking.

There were a bunch of mostly small-scale issues with solder whiskering, yeah; that Xbox thing was probably about the biggest. Swatch also notably had major problems (though they were trying to eliminate leaded solder somewhat _before_ RoHS; it's not like no-one cared about this until RoHS).

Also, of course, "systemic problem with _leaded_ soldering" was also a thing before RoHS; it's not like all was well in electronics manufacturing before then. You may, for instance, if you're old enough, remember the circa 2007 MBPs with the dying GPUs; that was a solder thing, and it predates RoHS.

I think RoHS 1 was a thing before 2007. Considering the xbox 360 came out in 2005. RoHS 2 has since replaced it.

Can we in europe have some law making go in the other direction?

Yeah, we'll get right on it. Increasing tarrifs should do it, right?

Whatever threats it'll take. I don't hold much hope. After all Trump couldn't even get us to raise defense spending to 2%.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com