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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

The relevant commission is supposed to re-assess and come up with new recommendations every 5 years.

If someone comes up with a better method for charging, they can get all the big device manufacturers in the room, convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.

This is not far-fetched. All the players relevant to internet, for example, collaborate to determine how web standards should evolve. It works pretty well. It's more or less the same companies who need to collaborate to build something better than USB-C.

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There should be no need whatsoever to convince your competitors and/or bureaucrats that allowing your new connector to be produced is in their interest. Only one should be convinced: the person buying the device.

If Apple made both USB-C and Lightning variants and let people choose: then sure, let the market decide.

In reality an oligopoly was stuck in a crappy stalemate and people had only compromised options. Carrying two sets of wires everywhere sucked.

We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.

But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.

> We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.

Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.

You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.

A handful of common standards is useless.

One standard for chargers is the only acceptable outcome and it wouldn't have gotten there without regulation.

What need is there to experiment with chargers? Wire go in, power go through - it's really not that complicated, the only important thing is standardization.

> What need is there to experiment with chargers?

That’s the point, I have no clue. But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.

Although as a physical connector usb-c is far from perfect. IMHO lighting seemed nicer in some ways.

> But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.

That seems like a false equivalency to me. It seems quite obvious that storage media have more potential for development than charging wires.

Wire go in - power go through, is literally all they need to do and USB-C does that pretty well.

No, it's cable go in, power go through, *cable doesn't fall out* and usb-c does that terribly after a few months.

I'm extremely pro standardisation, but the next revision needs to do a lot better.

MagSafe is a superior power connector in every way.

USB-c is absolutely not good enough. The connectors are often incompatible due to tiny manufacturing tolerances, cables from different manufacturers often fall out of the port after longer term use, don't make good connection so you have flaky charging, the cables and connectors look the same but are actually incompatible due to supporting only USB 2/3/4 or thunderbolt, whether displayport/hdmi alt mode is supported, etc. This small short-term gain at the cost of locking in USB-c forever was a terrible idea, brought to you by the same hypercompetent group that mandated cookie banners.

Cookie-banners were never mandated. It's just a fucking stupid way by the website operators, trying to circumvent data privacy regulation.

And when it comes to USB-C. Sure, it's far from perfect, but it's a great foundation to built upon and improve.

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That's the point, the regulation effectively locks in USB-C as it is.

The "bureaucrats" are a proxy for the person buying the device. That's literally the point of representative democracy. The average person doesn't want to make a million decisions on technical standards, so they elect somebody they trust to make them for them.

> convince most of them that the new method is better, and then the commission will likely adopt a new standard.

Only way they could actually prove that is by demonstrating it empirically. i.e. by implementing the technology in products which consumers use.

Any government commission is inherently incapable of making a legitimate proactive decision is such case. You might as well use some sort of a lottery system at that point..

That sounds really easy and straightforward. And yeah, committee decisions are well known for their technical excellence and far-sightedness.

Well, physical interoperable things are done by committees. You need the industry players involved if you want new interoperable standard to be widely spread. Unless it is one of the first movers.

Say how would you improve speed of copper based ethernet. Using nearly same cables and connectors? Every party making the chips must agree on very specific details.

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