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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

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The same thing existed for micro USB before but Apple could not agree to that or a new standard, so the EU said "USB-C". The law provides for upgrades and mandates compliance with the spec, including PD. If the spec upgrades, the law does so automatically.

This is a good thing.

USB-C is a horrible standard to consolidate on because of all the confusion about various sorts of USB-C cables (with exactly the same physical connectors) and thunderbolt cables.

Similarly, I’m glad Tesla convinced all the other American manufacturers to go with NACS for the American market because the CCS plugs are monstrosities.

CCS is great in Europe. You can plug in your normal 3 phase 400V EVSE and charge at 22kW at home, and twice a year when you need it, you can uncover the little extra flap for 350kW DC charging for on route to your holiday.

USB-C suffers from unclear naming problems sure, but in my experience most of the problems are actually caused by shady marketing pages. If they just clearly marked cables and ports with their capabilities, using the same physical connector would only be a benefit.

Those aren't really going to have an effect on the charging though. This standardization is only concerned about charging.

So no one is going to pick a theoretical "USB-D" that requires every cable to be able to carry 40 gb/s to be a standard. I don't need a 40 gb/s cable to charge a battery pack.

I have at least two devices that are “USB-C” for charging but will only work with USB-A to USB-C cables. USB-C wall warts seem to need a handshake the device doesn’t do. So I still can’t throw out my old wall warts and cables. It’s terrible.

It can be done with 2 resistors. It's kinda required because of the same port on both ends. If I plug a battery into a phone, should the phone charge the battery or should the battery charge the phone?

Ok, but manufacturers are cheaping out and leaving out resistors in devices. As a consumer, I don’t know this until I get home.

USB-C is great for 5V charging. And probably not awful for PD either.

All the weird data transport, seems like a big pile of maybe it will work, maybe it won't. I think most cables will do usb 2.0 data and probably usb 3.0 data, which covers a lot. I've managed not to need any of the other things, so avoidance seems to be pretty good. The one exception being the nintendo switch that does hdmi over usb-c, but sticking with their dock works enough for me.

These types of EU regulations (like the USB-C one on phones) don't prescribe anything. If the industry comes up with better tech, that's great, people can move on to that. What happens in the meanwhile is that the old standard remains on the device alongside the better system so that people aren't forced into wastefully tossing away dozens of cables overnight.

It's infinitely better than the absolute clown fiesta we used to have with phones, in either case.

> Regulations work best when they set a minimum requirement.

Not when the involved makers are incentisized otherwise.

Makers have the freedom to submit better options in the future. But it can't be the other way around.

I'm waiting now for Bluetooth to also have it's USB-C moment, and force every consumer device to have their core functionality accessible through a standardized communication protocol.

We'd get makers to submit better open specs, instead of the situation we have now.

Europe doesn't work that way (yet), there is no political weaponization of phone charges.

The European Parliament is advertising this as a win for the EU. Yet it isn’t entirely uncontroversial and there’s plenty of voices arguing it’s overreaching - easy to argue this matches the broad definition of political weaponization as-is.

"plenty of voices" doesn't mean any of them have merit

IMHO it's also closer to "dozens of us", than some critical mass of people strongly disagreeing.

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