A lot of people saying "USB-C cables aren't even compatible with each other!" (Nintendo switch etc.) Guess what: that's exactly the problem this regulation is intended to solve. Fake USB-C cables like Nintendo's that have the right shape but do not adhere to spec should gradually disappear along with lightning cables. The regulation actually says that cables can no longer be bundled with the devices themselves, so Nintendo would stop sending you that fake cable with your switch, and you would just buy a real one to work with all your devices.
Other people saying "what about innovation!?" That's fine. Let's say the USB consortium releases USB-D with input from Apple, Google, and many other stakeholders. The EU can set another deadline for newly released devices to adhere to the new version instead of the old one. The transition will involve a period of time where older devices are still on C and newer ones on D, which is totally compatible with the regulation and is necessary with or without regulation. It's ludicrous to think companies won't be able to "iterate": you would be crazy to go to market with any cable technology that isn't already very mature. Apple spent years designing lighting chargers because they knew that once they were released they'd be around for a long time (and they have been!)
I don't see why "What about innovation?" is taken seriously as an argument anyway. USB-C is more than adequate, we could coast with it for the next hundred years. Nobody is kept up at night by the lack of innovation in AC power plugs, the standards countries have settled on today, while not all equivalent, are all generally satisfactory in practice. Problem solved; stop fixing that which ain't broke and move on to other matters.
Yeah yeah, "640k should be enough for everybody". There comes a point where that is actually true.
> I don't see why "What about innovation?" is taken seriously as an argument anyway.
because the USB-IF historically has struggled to reach enough consensus from its stakeholders to allow innovation to take place. The entire reason that lightning exists in the first place is because USB-IF couldn't agree on a replacement for micro-B (which everyone agreed clearly needed improvement!) and one of the members just had to shrug and go do it themselves. Once one of the members had gone there and proven the concept, it lit a fire under the asses of the rest of the consortium.
Same for why thunderbolt exists as a standard and not as USB 4 in the first place... not enough consensus to go there as an official standard rather than an extension. It took what, 10 years after Thunderbolt was standardized before we finally pulled ourselves out of the fecal lagoon of USB 3.x standards?
And then you layer in the dysfunction from the members that are primarily interested in creating consumer confusion with the USB 3.0, USB3.1 Type-1, USB 3.1 Type-2, USB 3.2 Type-1, USB 3.2 Type-2, USB 3.2 Type-2x2 nonsense so that they can deceptively and maliciously sell yesterday's hardware with tomorrow's standard on the box... many of the members of USB-IF are interested in actively stalling progress if it means they save 30 cents on their BOM.
This is not an organization with consumer interests at heart. They are a bad choice to be the legal guardian (more like, conservator) of all innovation.
On top of that, I feel like USB-C is deliberately engineered to sell more ICs. Which wouldn't be that huge of an issue except as a result, all relevant ICs are sold out (or unsuitable).
CC/PD use a custom transmission standard so you can't implement it without a PHY, which basically means at least one dedicated IC.
A compliant USB-C source will not provide more than 5V/3A without PD negotiation period, and is only guaranteed to provide default USB power. So if you can potentially draw more, you need to check whether it's allowed.
>Gates himself has strenuously denied making the comment. In a newspaper column that he wrote in the mid-1990s, Gates responded to a student's question about the quote: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time." Later in the column, he added, "I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
Lightning cables don't last. They are a complete disaster. And that's not even considering how a little bit of dust can prevent your device from charging at all, and lightning ports are a complete dust magnet.
But the best argument against "what about lightning?" is the fact that Apple themselves don't use it on their higher powered devices like macs, and use USB-C instead.
Haven’t had any terrible experiences with lightning cables. I have several cables that are from 2016/2018 that I use regularly. But then again none of my type c cables go bad either… I think it would have been safer to say “from my experience <xyz>” instead of presenting your opinion as if it were more than just an opinion. I see how friends and family members treat their cables, tugging on the phone to disconnect instead of removing the cable by hand. Or placing the charger in a way that the cable is bent up against a piece of furniture. Regarding the lightning port, it’s actually quite easy to clean, compared to ports like usb-c (I’m guessing you know why that would be). Also using lightning on a Mac doesn’t make sense and that’s probably why they don’t do it.
I was never sure if it was dust causing my phone to refuse to charge or Apple's gatekeeping "official" cables. There used to be jailbreak tweaks that would allow unauthorized cables to suddenly start working fine, but the best I could do in iOS 14 was get a cable to maintain the battery (without charging it). Perhaps Apple is shooting their own standard in the foot simply by enforcing their certification program.
That said, you're absolutely right that its limit is reached already with phones. Some old cables have two pins (presumably VDD) that are discolored from use. Would not want lightning for charging a laptop.
All these arguments are the same I use… against USB-C.
I had 2 Google Pixels before with USB-C and both died because dust would accumulate around the center thingy and it was impossible to clean. The center thingy actually became loose on my second Pixel and the connector wouldn’t hold in place anymore.
I have since switched to an iPhone and I think the lightning connector stays remarkably clean. It’s also easier to clean because it doesn’t have the center piece of USB-C connectors.
All these arguments have nothing to do with the new legislation. Should there be laws to enforce “better” options? Then phones should have mil-spec round connectors. I insist I don’t understand what problem is the law supposed to solve.
This has absolutely zero to do with the plug design of Lightning. There are crap cables for USB-A, USB-C, USB Micro, 3.5" audio, and any other standard you want to find that don't last.
> And that's not even considering how a little bit of dust can prevent your device from charging at all, and lightning ports are a complete dust magnet.
By what magic do you believe that lightning ports collect pocket lint that USB-C is immune to?
> But the best argument against "what about lightning?" is the fact that Apple themselves don't use it on their higher powered devices like macs, and use USB-C instead.
Nobody is making this point. They're saying the sheer existence of the Lightning plug lit a fire under the USB-IF to finish and greenlight USB-C. If Apple hadn't started producing Lightning devices, it's entirely possible we'd still be dealing with USB Micro.
That said, I'll happily die on the hill that the Lightning plug design is almost unilaterally superior to the USB-C plug design.
Lightning only ever managed to coast by because of its slim form-factor and because Apple mandated its use. It's capable of USB2.0 at most (480Mbps), whereas USB-C can do 20Gbps today and 40Gbps when using Thunderbolt.
MagSafe on phones is a total joke, and MagSafe on laptops exists _alongside_ USB-C charging.
the lightning connector itself is capable of USB 3.0 speeds, apple just keeps the iphone line (or the cables?) at usb 2.0 spec. The ipad pro can reach full speed.
I'll add to the chorus saying lightning is terrible. I have a mix of devices using lightning and USB-C. I have had zero issues with USB-C, in fact I still charge my phone every night with the USB-C cable that came with my Pixel 1. I've never had to replace a single one, so much so that I have a nest of spare, unused, USB-C cables in a drawer. Meanwhile, lightning cables are a continuous roulette of failure - I would guess I've purchased at least a dozen replacement lightning cables over that same time period.
"thinner" is not a universally superior quality. It also means "more likely to get bent or broken" which implies "more likely to need replacing" which is one of the direct aims of this legislation.
I have literally never seen or heard of a Lightning plug or port "getting bent or broken". However I have heard of the hidden-male-inside-of-female port of on-device USB-C ports breaking at which point your device is trash.
I assume that's mostly complaints about the cable insulation rather than the connector.
Lightning connectors do have the advantage you can safely stick a toothpick in them to remove lint, I don't know if lint building up inside the socket is a problem specific to lightning though.
I used both Lightning and USB-C cables, I had two Lightning cables dying from oxidation (not misuse in water or anything, normal use) and not a single USB-C problem so far.
Calling Lightning superior is blatant Apple fanboyism.
Lightning isn't as fast as USB 3.0 (which USB C cables should support), and can't supply as much power as USB-PD (which, again, works over USB C cables)
So in the 15 years since micro-USB was developed, that is just one vendor which has been able to produce something better, and it happens to be the most valuable corporation in the world with access to economics of scale that no other manufacturer could compete with. Are you saying that's a valid justification that allowing manufacturers the freedom to innovate on charging ports is more important than interoperability?
Yes, exactly: the tiny amount of genuine innovation that exists in this particular area is not worth giving up interoperability and regressing back to the pre-micro-USB world of mostly terrible, rarely innovative proprietary connectors from every different vendor.
> their wreckless legislators could have actual impact.
I think the positive impact of the currently existing micro-USB legislation is clear if you look back at the status quo before it existed. This new legislation simply improves upon it.
Lightning is a decent cable technology from a form factor position, but it has several technology drawbacks. First each lightning device (including cables) have to pay a nontrivial royalty to apple bringing up the minimum cost of accessories. Secondly the standard is limited to relatively low power and data rates.
Notice also that nothing prevents apple from additionally shipping MagSafe on their laptops, the device just needs to be usable with a type-C charger.
I don't think they can. The legislation explicitly mandates usb-c as the device port. Sure, Apple can engineer their own proprietary-to-usbc adapter and ship it with their phones, but they will no longer be allowed to use a non-usbc port on the phone itself.
Device-side connector: the included devices would have to be equipped with a USB-C receptacle on the device side (as described in the European standard EN IEC 62680-1-3:2021) and, in cases of charging power lower than 60 watts, be rechargeable with cables that complied with the same standard
Then on page 8, the latest expansion of scope:
Included devices: a larger range of small and medium-sized devices with power delivery up to 100 watts would be included under the scope of the directive, including e-readers, low-powered laptops, keyboards, mice, earbuds, screens, printers, portable navigations, smartwatches, personal care devices and electronic toys
Note the personal care devices: looks like this is going to include electronic toothbrushes and electric razors.
That's a good overview of the features of UK plugs, but a terrible one for establishing the supposed superiority of the UK design.
Much of what he describes is e.g. a feature of Schuko plugs/sockets.
The main distinguishing feature of the UK design is a technical workaround for a problem that no longer exists (WWII copper shortage requiring the embedded fuse).
I like US plugs. Sure, it's easier to shock yourself with them, but you usually only do that once (because it feels bad, not because it's often fatal).
I like them because they're small. I have a nifty little 3-port USB-A/C power supply where the plug folds flush. Europlug would have trouble doing that, and it's outright impossible with Schuko and UK plugs.
To be totally fair, it's not like a phone manufacturer is going to put 2 different ports on their device, so this is essentially regulating data as well as power. But also to be fair, USB-C cables that support thunderbolt 3 are a couple orders of magnitude faster (throughput) than Apple's lightning cables (40 Gbps vs ~480 Mbps), and if Apple could possibly support such speeds without releasing a new backwards-incompatible cable, they would have done so long ago.
If Apple ever wanted to support faster than 40 Gbps, they would have to do so in concert with the rest of the tech industry and release it as an open standard. I'd like to hear somebody try to argue this is a bad thing.
> But also to be fair, USB-C cables that support thunderbolt 3 are a couple orders of magnitude faster (throughput) than Apple's lightning cables (40 Gbps vs ~480 Mbps)
however, extremely few devices ship capable of these data rates, and many USB-C cables ship only supporting 480 mbps data transfer.
> ... Apple could possibly support such speeds without releasing a new backwards-incompatible cable, they would have done so long ago.
Lightning supports USB 3 (superspeed 5gbps) speeds. The lightning USB 3 camera adapter supports it for compatible devices. They did indeed figure this out long ago. They didn't do it because most people don't use lightning cables for data or even understand they _could_ use lightning cables for data.
> If Apple ever wanted to support faster than 40 Gbps, they would have to do so in concert with the rest of the tech industry and release it as an open standard. I'd like to hear somebody try to argue this is a bad thing.
Apple contributed to both thunderbolt iterations and to USB4. They were first adopters of both, as well as shipping the first USB-C laptop. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here.
Contrarily, if they were able to pass that standard quickly, it would stand to reason that they could also pass a USB-C standard quickly.
USB-C becoming standardized for phones will not slow the advancement of USB specs, and if the physical form factor becomes a constraint somehow, they will devise a better one and will standardize it likewise, even if consumer model phones can't ship with them from day 0.
A great example of this is EV charging connectors. The Tesla spec was superior until recently, but because the EU has mandated CCS, as communication/payment has been implemented within the standard, European cars find themselves with a universal plug and a universal charging network that can be unilaterally improved.
Meanwhile in the US we now have 2 charging networks on 2 standards, and no real path to unification.
The Tesla spec still is superior. Europeans just don't get its benefits anymore. The CCS mandate was mostly protectionism and I strongly doubt it would have happened if Tesla were headquartered in Germany.
There are currently three different fast charging standards, Tesla’s, CCS, and Chademo, and a vast need for improvements in charging infrastructure. If you don’t have a common standard, you end up with a fragmented network that caps everyone’s utility. Imagine if ICE cars could only get gas from certain types of stations, it’s madness.
Are you saying that there already was a large, established CCS production base in Europe at the time the standard was introduced? Otherwise, what were they protecting?
Tesla was not dominating. It was just moving early and had momentum because of that. I do not see evidence that the tesla charger is superior or CCS inferior.
MagSafe-style charging connectors are an innovation that, IMO, justifies breaking compatibility. I dislike this forced standardization on USB-C because USB-3/USB-C is a user-hostile nightmare standard.
Having lived in a country (Thailand) where both Euro and US plugs work just fine as long as you mind your voltage, I have become quite annoyed at that lack of innovation.
In Thailand I became quite annoyed by the lack of grounding. If your sockets where actually modern enough to have ground, it is rarely connected to anything at all, or sometimes just screwed to the wall. Rare to find a ground spike in a dwelling. Common to get zapped by your shower's electric water heater.
My place in Bangkok is a nice modern luxury building... at least it was luxury when they built it 17 years ago, now it's falling apart a bit but the amenities are awesome. The electric is probably grounded straight into the Chao Phraya river. :-)
It's not the plugs, it's the devices (or more commonly now, the power adapters) that work with 120, 240, or however many volts.
Nowadays many (most?) things take both voltages or, AFAICT -- I'm no electrician! -- anything reasonably close.
So in Thailand, for the most part, you can just plug in your MacBook or whatever and you don't need an adapter for the plug itself. Of course, if you're wrong about the voltage, things might go bad.
And as the other reply noted, this convenience doesn't make it safer, quite the opposite. But I just generally have realized there's a lot of innovation that could be done in plugs and sockets, but isn't being done.
As someone else commented above, the UK plugs are really interesting... but in my opinion maddeningly, unnecessarily big.
Not sure how a technologist could think that USB-C is the best that we could do. It could be smaller, easier to attach in the dark, easier to attach with one hand, etc. etc.
The government is not good at technology. They should step out of the way and let the consumer decide.
Well, there are some serious drawbacks to USB-C. For one, it's not IP rated, which means you cannot use it to charge anything in a bathroom or a kitchen. That's a shame because there are a lot of appliances like electric toothbrushes that would also benefit from a single plug.
The innovation was primarily financial innovation in taking money unnecessarily from your customers, except for a very few cases. Lightning was a good cable in the early days, but but then became a financial windfall for apple of course.
I think this is a stupid thing. Repurposing a commonly used connector for other things to reuse cheap connectors and cables is something that is usually done in the electronic industry (e.g. my oscilloscope use an HDMI socket for the logic analyzer input, you have plenty of lines and the connector is cheap and good). It's not uncommon to design a board and use type-C only for power (5V input, without the circuitry to handle power delivery, so you must connect a suitable power supply) or for other things (TTL serial data).
> Fake USB-C cables like Nintendo's that have the right shape but do not adhere to spec should gradually disappear along with lightning cables
Which spec? There are a multitude of them! What we do, adhere all to the best spec and to only feed 5V power to a device (that could be done with 2 wires) require the same cable used to connect a thunderbolt device at 40Gb/s? Of course not, since the first one costs a couple of dollars, the second one tens of dollars, the first one can be as long as voltage drop permits it to be, the second one needs to be maximum 1 meter, the first one needs no shielding at all, the second one needs to be heavily shielded, that not only increases cost but makes it bulkier. And again, does a data cable that is used for thunderbolt connection (assuming that the thunderbolt device is externally powered) be designed to carry the full 5A of the spec? 5A is a lot of current, it will require bigger conductors, but for a data cable it doesn't make sense!
Type-C is a standard that makes to me not a lot of sense: they wanted to create the one connector that fits all, while in the past they designed different connector, one for each device, not because they wanted you to buy more cables but to avoid confusion in customers, if the cable fits it works I used to say back in the day, the VGA connector was physically different from a serial port, the PS2 connector was not the same as a parallel port, even if they could have done everything with one port they didn't.
The lowest spec for cables requires 5 wires (CC, 2 * USB 2.0, GND, PWR) and a rating of 3A. CC pins are required for USB-C, if they're left out most devices won't charge over it [1]. 3A is (in my opinion) a reasonable choice, since pre-USB-C devices took up to 2.1A and backwards compatibility is important. USB 2.0 data lanes aren't required for charging per-se, but the older charging protocols preceding USB-C did signalling of the allowed current over the USB 2.0 data lines (otherwise, only 100 mA is allowed).
If you want to build a board, compatible with all USB-IF certified chargers and cables and all USB-PD power supplies, that only takes 5 V, the circuitry is two resistors. BOM is always important and stuff, but two resistors is as cheap as it gets. If you just throw it on a board and don't even bother to do a 2 minute google search, I'd take that as an indicator of the effort behind the rest of the board.
If it's obvious that it's not a "real" usb-c connector, deviations are reasonable IMHO (for example, a high speed scope connector or a port labelled "debug" on measurement equipment), but for power it's a bad idea. Some products use a "USB-C" power supply putting out 12V all the time (frying other devices connected to it) or save on the 2 resistors, leading to a lot of user confusion when devices will only work with USB-A to USB-C cables.
To the latter point: Doubt it. HDMI has tried to include Ethernet (with optional data wires), which luckily was a huge failure (almost no one implemented it). DisplayPort was trying to become USB-C before USB became USB-C. Ethernet now often doubles as a power supply. SD card slots could serve as an additional periphery slot in PDAs with SDIO. The only port common on a modern laptop that didn't (at least try) to include some completely other feature is probably the 3.5mm headphone socket (probably since there is no standard committee and even agreeing on how the 4 pin extension should work was a huge mess).
[1] The CC line is needed to determine which device is a power sink & power source. Otherwise, users might connect two 5V power supplies together and create a short (between probably 5.2V & 4.8V)
> Of course not, since the first one costs a couple of dollars, the second one tens of dollars,
Of course yes.
If the industry was stupid enough to put all of this behind a single plug, then single cable it is. Because pretty much every consumer who has more than one USB3/C cable is dead tired of "oh. This combo doesn't work, let me root for the other cables"
In order to talk to my friends, family, and coworkers I need to have the following apps installed and running: Slack, Teams, Telegram, Signal, WhatsApp, Google Chat/Hangouts/Allo/Whatever, FB Messenger, Discord, Twitter, etc.
It'd take a pretty strong argument to convince me that this is so much more productive and allows for more innovation than the old days when the spec for things like Email, HTTP, IRC, XMPP allowed for a plethora of different tools unrelated to the company sponsoring the tech and people figured out how to make money USING the interoperable tech instead of OWNING the tech.
I actually love the choice and the separation. And when an innovation good enough appears on a platform, it is quickly copied on the others (reactions…)
I'm willing to bet that your friends and family wouldn't be happy if the European Union would mandate using IRC everywhere. Heck, why not go further and stick to the good old ntalk [1].
I used XMPP around 2003 when it was still called Jabber. I can't say there's something major wrong with it (only XML verbosity comes to my head), it's just the idea of making it mandatory. By the way how come some EU officials use Zoom? [1] Where are those good open standards?
Funny you should mention Zoom, which just like Whatsapp is pretty much a half-baked proprietary XMPP implementation. Now if we had proper interop regulations mandating interoperability between commercial entities (no need to apply that to hobby/research projects), we could talk between all these networks.
Sure it would take a few months of serious dedication for these chat vendors to write specifications for the protocol spaghetti they came up with, but the benefits would be tremendous.
So why is "nobody" using XMPP protocol? The problem is not exactly with the specifications (although there's still a little margin for interpretation here and there, they keep evolving for the better) but rather with the implementations. Since a protocol is not tied to a single implementation, it requires additional resources to develop user-friendly clients. This fact is used by an argument by some people (see also: m0xie's The Ecosystem is moving) to justify centralizing all communications and protocol development. This argument was amply debunked by Daniel Gultsche (who maintains an Android XMPP client) and Drew Devault (who maintains an (unfederated-so-far) forge):
There's also a lot to say about the Matrix/Element approach, which has some good and bad sides. I'm happy to elaborate if that's of interest to someone.
If you want to have provider choice for customers and interoperability between messaging apps, I don't think there is another way than making standards mandatory.
Why do you think WhatsApp reached a billion dollar evaluation? Not because users have the freedom to move to a different provider and still be able to talk to all their friends...
The only other possibility is that users start rejecting providers who do not comply with internet standards (and I don't see that happening, even here on Hacker News).
Making something mandatory will definitely push things forward because what else are the providers going to do? Though I still have doubts about real progress being made. EU can't can even add VP9 and AV1 to the list of codecs used for Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB).
Instead maybe the government should start eating its own dog food and use an open standard for both internal and external use.
The bridges are not horrible. But they aren’t super reliable. I have seen them go down for a few days once, generally be a bit slow, forward messages out of order, etc.
The free matrix.org server is also overloaded. The paid server is much faster.
Internet standards have consistently failed to innovate. Email and IRC have failed to progress along with proprietary platforms. Features like end to end encryption require user effort and plugins which never took off.
Having 5 IM apps installed is much preferable to me than 1 worse app. Not sure the situation for XMPP but I have been told its highly fragmented with extensions that not all clients support. If I'm talking with someone, I want a high level of assurance that their client is pretty much the same as mine and that all features work and look roughly the same on both sides.
> Internet standards have consistently failed to innovate.
Internet standards do not innovate. People that adopt standards and built interesting things with them do.
For example, Google originally wrote the Jingle XMPP extension. Sadly, it seems like there are no real economic incentives for interoperabilty in the IM space (quite the opposite if you already have a lot of users on your platform), so we don't see a lot of investment going into the adoption of internet standards from big players anymore.
PC and x86 took us pretty far... And that was mostly carried on interoperability... I doubt we would have gotten to technology being as ubiquitous as it is without it.
Funny enough, France's failed internet, the Minitel would probably be the solution pushed today by the EU.
The Internet won on the free market, through its own merits. No politician intervention necessary. Even if plenty tried to capture the glory (information superhighway…)
Do you have any credible sources to base that claim on, other than "let's paint the government as idiots"? Did you know that TCP/IP was based on that other "failed" french network, Cyclades?
I'm all in favour the EU doing what it's doing, but x86 is actually a good example to not enforce this standard. Imagine that the EU enforced x86 as well, what would've happened to ARM ?
When in history has interoperability not been a catalyst for innovation? Look at everything people do in browsers now. Or if that's not to your taste, perhaps the era of BASIC is a better example. Not all standards are good, but a decent standard is better, or at least much more practically useful, than a lot of better but incompatible proprietary equivalents.
Of course it doesn't have to be mandated, and in the past usually wasn’t, but hell, it’s hard to see many good reasons to not standardize on USB-C. It’s got plenty of pins, it’s already mass-manufactured, and outside of only a single product Apple sells, there’s not much competition aside from legacy stuff that can’t handle a lot of today’s data, form factor and power delivery needs.
Different conditions beget different types of innovation. Interoperable systems evolved things (paradigms, models, languages…) that competing ones couldn't, and the opposite is also true. The world needs both, and probably everything in-between.
OK. We like competition. But the “almost” part is a little bit underplayed here. It doesn’t “almost always” breed innovation. Sometimes it breeds 50 different horribly positioned walled gardens. The consumer loses, the lack of interoperability becomes a tragedy of the commons, and our landfills are full of garbage nobody needs. Case in point: Home automation. I challenge you to scroll through the full list of things you can integrate with Google Home and try to justify why there needs to be this many different proprietary ways to interconnect devices. Home automation is not a new market, either: the X10 standard has been around since 1975.
This same kind of madness, of course, totally already exists elsewhere. I’m sorry but, out of the hundreds of thousands of different power connectors, most of them aren’t even very well thought out to begin with, less “innovative.” It turns out that delivering power to a device isn’t that interesting, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get it horribly wrong. For every MagSafe that has at least some redeeming qualities, there’s about 500 DELL power bricks out there. And for something that is effectively delivering small amounts of low voltage DC power, in fact often one of about 2 or 3 different voltages, it’s sad that you have to scour the earth for chargers that match the pinout of your device.
But wait a minute. We’re not even talking about laptops, but essentially just mobile phones and cameras. So where’s the innovative competitor to USB-C that we’re all so worried about getting stomped on by the EU? Even Apple has adopted USB-C for almost everything except iPhone. micro USB hardly exists on new phones, even the budget phones are switching to USB-C.
The market doesn’t just automatically do the right thing. Apple is simply too powerful for market forces alone to compel them to use a “standard” charger, and actually, the friction of changing something that works probably makes it resistant against that, but just because that’s the case does not mean it is the right way to go for consumers or the world in general, in the long term. And once enough people are tired of that non-sense, they turn to regulation. And I’m sure regulation like this is annoying—what does the EU know about connectivity and mobile phone design—but it’s probably relieving to Apple, because it roughly solves the problem of having to reconcile it: they either do it, or they are in violation of the law. Problem solved!
And no innovation was harmed, because plugging phones in is not that interesting.
P.S.: Interoperability absolutely breeds innovation, and it does not mean no competition, it builds a framework for competition. Standards do obviously limit what you can do, but in exchange they open many doors that would otherwise be closed. Please tell me you don’t think the “innovation” from having 30 competing hypertext formats would’ve been the ideal path to “innovation” for the world wide web.
Hardware innovation relies on competition. Interoperability can be useful for iteration but true hardware innovation would seem to require being different from the status quo, no?
Commodification spurs innovation at a level above the commodity. I love Linux but its ubiquity is partly to blame for why I am not using a capability based OS on my personal devices.
The whole history of sciences builds a case for interoperability, not against. See also the railway sizes problem (eg. in Australia), the electric/lighting socket standardization, doorlocks...
Were it not for standards and regulations you would have to buy different locks, lightbulbs, and charger adapters depending on the company which built your apartment. It's already annoying enough that these specifications change from one country to another, but it would be a complete nightmare if there were no interoperability regulations at all.
Also, more specifically about computing: the Internet being an open standard brought many advantages for innovation, compared to centralized networks such as MSN or AOL. As for hardware, i don't know about you but i'm pretty happy i can change my CPU/RAM/HDD with any socket-compatible product and i'm not tied to a single vendor... in fact i'm pretty angry when i find a machine where some parts are non-standard and cannot be easily replaced.
To be clear, i'm not saying there's no value in deviating from the standards for innovation. I'm just saying 99% of usecases are better addressed with standard solutions than with halfbaked proprietary "solutions".
AOL used SMTP and NFS and TCP/IP and many many other open protocol interop things. It wasn't great at sharing back, I am afraid, but it wouldn't have been able to be what it was without the internet protocols and many other open things (network socket programming, DLPI, heck sendmail, SSL, HTTP compression). AOL is a prime example of how a solid infrastructure enables new businesses (but those businesses might not stick with the partner that brought them).
Yours doesn't hold for hardware either. MacBooks are comparable and competitive to PC laptops, but it's only your opinion that they are superior.
Having used a few different models of MacBook over the last decade for work, and owning a few different models of Thinkpads over the same timeframe, I'd take the Thinkpad any day of the week. From the annoyingly either hot or cold all-metal case to the floating ground problem triggering shocks when using the fold-out wall connector, MacBooks are inferior in my book. But that is also only my opinion.
“The regulation actually says that cables can no longer be bundled with the devices themselves”
I don’t think anyone’s mentioned that. Oh my god, tech social media is going to melt down when that kicks in if the reaction to chargers being excluded is any indication (not to mention a repeat of the shift from 30-pin to Lightning in Apple’s case, except now without a cable).
I have had usb cables from usb rechargeable bike lights that leaked into my ever growing bundle of cables. So I'm never quite sure which USB cable will work with what. I'd never knowingly buy these crap cables.
As far as a I know, in the history of smartphones - which I'd say starts in 2007 with the launch of the iPhone - there have only really been 4 (or maybe 5) connectors used on widely sold phones:
1. Apple 30pin "iPod" connector
2. Apple Lightning connector
3. Mini USB (I don't think this ever appeared on anything but blackberries and cheapo flip phones?)
4. Micro USB
5. USB-C
So, while I agree that cable changes are annoying, and I support standardization efforts, "a new one every other year" is just not how it's ever been. 5 connectors in 15 years. The 30pin connector reigned from 2007 to 2012, and on the android side, micro USB was dominant until around 2015-2016 when USB-C started showing up on phones. Realistically, it's been a new connector every ~7 years.
Except that the current USB-C situation is a mess, and this regulation plans to solve this.
I got a pretty expensive HP monitor for work from my company that connects via USB-C (and can charge my Mac). IT has sworn me to not loose its USB-C cable because for some unknown reasons it refuses to work with other cables, it costs >$100 and is constantly out of stock.
It's kind of sad to me that Apple doesn't make Lightning an open standard.
In all my years, I haven't had a single Lightning connector fail on me. The solid metal where the contacts reside is just too robust to wear out or get damaged (unless you somehow step on it the right way or let it corrode).
USB-C connectors, on the other hand, seems to loosen after a rather small number mates and de-mates, leading people to use preemptive workarounds such as magnetic connectors.
I connect disconnect the same USB-C connector minimum 8 times a day for 4 years now. I have yet to have any issue with it. USB micro B connectors that got the same treatment repeatedly failed.
The USB C jacks I have seen on PCBs so far seem all to look pretty solid to me, although I am convinced you can also get cheap ones that will just happily fail if you just tried. Getting cheap Lightning connectors will be a lot harder, for obvious reasons.
So if we do the comparison between Apple and something else, let's not fall into the old trap of comparing an 1000€ ios device to an 100€ android device and declaring android to be unusable.
> In all my years, I haven't had a single Lightning connector fail on me. The solid metal where the contacts reside is just too robust to wear out or get damaged (unless you somehow step on it the right way or let it corrode).
I'm on my second phone where the Lightning connector barely works anymore. 'Thankfully' this one support Qi so I can charge wireless, but if I want to do a wired backup or upgrade I have to jiggle the cable like mad to get any kind of connection.
If you haven't, you might want to try carefully "cleaning out" the lightning port with a toothpick or other small tool. I've seen multiple iPhones collect enough lint and dust in the lightning port over the years to make the connection still work sometimes but be unreliable until you clean it out
I just had a Lighting port fail on me (partial thankfully - there's one single cable in my house that still works to charge the thing) - but it's a 2014 device, a good 7-8 years old.
I've had a Lightning port fail on my original SE last year. Replaced it with the part taken from a donor SE. That was a bit scarier job than replacing the battery, but still doable.
I’ve had two iPhones serviced (replaced) due to lightning port failure. I also had few cables replaced due to them getting the surface on the contact pins literally burned by the micro-fires caused by the high-current and the fibre residue of the fabric.
So, yours is just as anecdotal as mine. Would actually have to see some numbers comparing Lightning vs USB-C failure rate (on some premium Android smartphones), which we are unlikely to.
I had never had a single cord fray on me except every single Apple supplied white cord for years, until suddenly I no longer had that problem. Don't know what changed but glad it did
Interesting. The only lighting cable that has failed me so far is the usbC to lightning cable that came with my 13 Pro. All other cables are still in use. Including some cheap ones that get abused being jostled in my backpack.
Definitely, those Apple-supplied cables suck hard. Adding little tension relief springs[0] to the ends can protect them if you don't want to buy another (or more robust) cable and create more e-waste. You can find the springs in clicky pens.
The Apple supplied cables seem to be quite environmentally friendly already since they literally rot at the ends. Not only lightning but also the MagSafe ones. The Lightning connector itself mechanically is the best connector I've ever encountered, though. Pure satisfaction when plugging it in, even after 5 years or so
I assume that the reason for not making Lightning an open standard is that the thing on the technical level is really tightly coupled to iOS. On electrical level it is mostly an “two-lane” HS USB. USB-Lightning cable is basically wires, but other kinds of Lightning peripherals use weird protocols that are highly XNU/Darwin/iOS specific, mostly because that was the simpler implementation (looking at how things like AirPlay/CarPlay works show that Apple does not intentionally produce proprietary interfaces, but they use open standards as long as there are open standards and just invent the simplest thing when there is no applicable standard).
In the three years my spouse has had an Apple device, I've had two first-party cables fray and wear out at the connector, the lightning port get fouled up with lint and require cleaning, and I think three third-party cables stop working at all with no obvious damage.
In the same time, I've only had two usb-c cables fail on me, both third-party.
I did have three other usb-c cables destroyed by careless children breaking the usb-a side off at the charger (all three plugged into a knee-height automotive charger in the back seat area), but that's less of a failure of the cable and more a testament to that plucky Anker auto charger that's still going fine.
> Let's say the USB consortium releases USB-D with input from Apple, Google, and many other stakeholders [...]
If you have to make such an argument, you've already lost.
Innovation, particularly disruptive and / or breakthrough innovation, does not happen by committee, no matter how many times over history people tried deluding themselves into thinking that it does.
It's very strange to read this comment on article about USB, which has been developed by committee from the beginning. To me it seems quite innovative, and arguably disruptive to have a single standard for all these things. Maybe USB doesn't clear your personal bar, but then why worry about this at all?
I can't be sure, but my interpretation of the parent's comment is that the USB-IF would never have thought to work on USB-C at all until Lightning's release two years earlier. The whole forehead-slapping moment of cables that didn't need to be flipped was a pretty big divergence from the USB-A, -B, mini B, micro B, etc. that has prevailed previously. The kernel of the argument being, Apple's "innovation" by rejecting the status quo is what allowed for the (eventual) development of the USB-C standard.
This is actually fairly common in Apple-land, now that I look:
- ADB (1986) to PS2 (1987) to USB-A (1996) for HID
- Firewire (1995) to USB 2.0 (2000) to Firewire 800 (2002) to USB 3.0 (2008) for data transfer
- VGA (1987) to ADC (1998) to DVI (1999) for video
A lot of the connectors they proposed are now lost to the mists of time, but I can at least understand the argument that some of these changes were plausibly driven by Apple's rejection of the then-standard in favor of some new benefit (faster speeds, better UX), which lasted only until a new standard was developed to incorporate that benefit, and the process repeats again.
> my interpretation of the parent's comment is that the USB-IF would never have thought to work on USB-C at all until Lightning's release two years earlier
it's actually worse than that, there was extensive discussion of what to do next since micro-B was still obviously flawed, they just couldn't reach a consensus to take any action even after years of debate.
the thing to remember is that USB-IF isn't a benevolent organization of technology companies working together to set a direction for the future - many of them are primarily interested in reducing their own costs, which is why we got the "USB 3.x Gen 2x2 Wave 2: USB Harder" crap. Many of the players at USB-IF are specifically interested in stalling progress as long as it saves them 30 cents on their BOM.
> The whole forehead-slapping moment of cables that didn't need to be flipped was a pretty big divergence from the USB-A, -B, mini B, micro B, etc. that has prevailed previously.
It's weird; cable orientation was (and still is) a big problem with USB-A, but not because having to deal with orientation is a problem that needs to be solved. Orientation is not a problem, at all, with USB-B, mini-B, or micro-B. The own goal in USB-A was delivering a connnector that is sensitive to orientation at the same time that it's visually symmetrical. There was no need to make the connector insensitive to orientation. It would have made at least as much sense to make the asymmetry visible, the way every other connector does.
From time to time Intel's marketing tries to sell the idea that USB was invented by this one Intel engineer. Somewhat obviously that is not true.
On the other hand if you compare USB 1.0 to 1.1 it is quite obvious that real implementation experience and throwing out artifacts of the design by committee was quite important for the success.
I was going to disagree as I used to know one the standards people at Intel quite well (who always regretted that USB was orientation specific)--and I didn't remember anything like that. But you're right. Intel was pushing Ajay Bhatt was one of the people Intel highlighted as a face behind Intel's technology. (Although the campaign wasn't specific to USB.) https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2009/05/intel_ad_campaig...
> On the other hand if you compare USB 1.0 to 1.1 it is quite obvious that real implementation experience and throwing out artifacts of the design by committee was quite important for the success.
This sounds like it has some interesting history there; do you have any recommended sources to read about the transition between USB 1.0 and 1.1?
Especially since I know that several people at Digital Equipment Corporation had to do the signal integrity analysis for Intel for the original USB standard.
Ah what lovely place our technological lives would be without standards, that are done by committees... No standardised wireless technologies like Bluetooth, WiFi, 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G... Each and every provider and technology manufacturer running their own incompatible networks... Hey, maybe throw away IP and TCP too... Let each site run on their own proprietary protocol...
ETSI (which is the parent organization of 3GPP) is technically an independent non-profit NGO, but in reality it is part of EU bureaucracy and was chartered by EC.
Maybe we could’ve put all that regulatory effort and politician time into resolving not even climate change, but just EU's dependence on cheap Russian fossil fuels.
It can be disproved within reason. The only new thing a magic new cable would bring to the table is more power, which is not practical to have.
The big innovation I'd love to have? Having only ONE charger for all my devices, forever. That absolutely destroys any "innovation" Apple or whoever can bring to the table.
The directive is designed to make things easier for customers and the environment, not OEMs per se (even though there will be benefits for a number of companies).
it's always interesting to me that people ignore the ecological impact of cables. If you break four cables over the life of the phone from plugging/unplugging, and that results in 2 or 3 additional Amazon Prime trips to deliver your cables, how does that compare in terms of environmental impact to wasting 5 additional watts for the 1 hour a day you charge your phone?
(and don't tell me everybody uses Amazon Prime day shipping... people just order new cables when they break. And sure, you can have one common pool of all your cables... sort of! except for the part where cable X or charger X doesn't fast-charge device Y, so you actually need several pools of chargers and cables...)
I personally never had a charging cable break in ~12 years, owning multiple mobile devices in parallel, so in my experience that isn’t a relevant consideration. That aside, I’m more concerned with the accelerated decrease in battery life that I experienced first-hand with MagSafe charging. I stopped using it because of that.
I guess I did say plugging/unplugging, but certain types of cables are very prone to kinking. I've broken a number of cables if they get a loop and then you set something heavy on them, or if you lay on them in bed, etc. In the car I go through a 3.5mm cable and a usb cable every couple years as well, for largely the same reasons - they get tugged or bumped or something set on them and they break. It's especially likely with the crappy cheap cables that most people buy - I've had a lot better luck since switching to mostly braided cables, I think the sheath gives it a bit more strength.
Failures due to "user error" are still failures that induce cable replacement, and a cable that you interact with less (because it's running to a fixed wireless charger stand/pad) is less likely to have user error failure modes like that. Wireless connection or wireless charging (built into the car, f.ex) removes these modes entirely - you can't break an aux cable that doesn't exist.
You can't just assume "nobody ever breaks a cable" as being a realistic proposition when looking at the lifecycle of these products - I'm not sure I believe you in the first place that you've never broken a cable in 12 years but that's certainly not realistic for the population as a whole.
One of the companies can continue to do research into new cable technologies, and when they've found something that is amazing they can present it to the committee for approval as the new standard. The committee is not there to innovate, it is there to ensure that everyone is using the same thing, which is a benefit to (most) consumers.
Proprietary connectors are about as far from innovation as you can possibly get, unless you count patent moats and corporate grift as part of innovating.
They happen between walled gardens, them they sponsor a comitee to turn into a standard. The only difference between current and standard based is a bunch of extra burocracy where your competitor will try to fit their custom walled garden extension that is hard to implement to give them an edge.
Not OP. But a breakthrough innovation in charging could be a new battery-technology holding charge for much longer but required different charging specifications offered by USB-C. Such a breakthrough would hopefully get enough attention from EU to get the law updated. Or they might want the devices to still have USB-C? Who knows who's in charge then.
Also missing from this discussion is the fact that even if the law is only about charging it will define he go-to data-connection for smaller devices for a long time, where an additional port will be dimensionally challenging, more costly to add as well as difficult to make water-resistant.
I am sympathetic for reducing e-waste, but I'm unsure where this will lead us. Crypto-mining is also bad for the environment but might hold unknown positive possibilities if explored properly (maybe reduce bureaucracy, avoid monopolies) that could be extinguished by a premature ban.
I am already paying some of the highest taxes on consumer products compared to other countries in the world, I would rather pay even more for a charger, phone etc., remember an adapter when out and about and keep the freedom of choosing which technologies to support.
*Also just wanted to add that even if OP mentioned the committee, I'm unsure how much you can compare that to EU making laws enforceable in 27 countries.
who needs breakthrough innovation for a charger? It's like the C++ programming language, I just want it to work everywhere. Programming languages have been designed by committee just fine.
>What would you say if EU demanded us to stop programming in Python, Rust, bash and mandate that only C++ must used?
I support the idea that regulatory bodies like the EU create stronger software standards in safety critical applications in particular so that software 'engineering' actually starts to deserve that label so I have no problem with a good faith version of that take.
What do you mean with "go back 5 years"? You're aware that things were already standardized on USB Micro-B in 2009? This is just an update to the existing situation, with one slight but important difference: while under the previous MoU Apple was still allowed to buck the trend, this new legislation will force Apple to fall in line. For the rest of the industry, nothing will change.
In 2009, the Commission facilitated a voluntary memorandum of understanding (MoU), signed by major producers, that aimed to guarantee interoperability between chargers and mobile phones on the EU market. The MoU resulted in a significant reduction of available charger types and a convergence to USB Micro-B connectors on the device side: while there were more than 30 proprietary chargers on the EU market in 2009, by 2012 (a year after the MoU started to apply), nine in ten new devices supported the USB Micro-B connection.
> Innovation, particularly disruptive and / or breakthrough innovation, does not happen by committee, no matter how many times over history people tried deluding themselves into thinking that it does.
You have no evidence to back this up. There's been throughout history many innovative standards that have gone through committee work, including a ton of network protocols.
> Other people saying "what about innovation!?" That's fine. Let's say the USB consortium releases USB-D with input from Apple, Google, and many other stakeholders. The EU can set another deadline for newly released devices to adhere to the new version instead of the old one. The transition will involve a period of time where older devices are still on C and newer ones on D, which is totally compatible with the regulation and is necessary with or without regulation.
If your idea of "innovation" is moving from one version of a spec to another version of the same spec requiring multiple trillion dollar companies and the EU setting a timeline, then your usage of the word is much narrower than mine.
Many advances that I consider truly innovative have often come from outsiders without the backing of the largest companies in the world and succeeded from the bottom up.
1. Cables have radically different capabilities - they may charge at 60W, 100W or 240W ; they may be limited to 480 mbps transmission rates or go all the way up to 40 gbps transmission. Up until now, the market has not regulated such that you can tell the difference when you grab a random cable, or necessarily tell the difference at time of purchase
2. Devices like the Nintendo Switch and Raspberry Pi shipped with broken implementations. For instance, the RPi would not work with cables that _supported_ over 60W charging rates.
I was one of the Nintendo switch commenters in this thread - the problem I have is standardising on the connector without enforcing the underlying standards. This doesn't fix the charging problem or the cable problem, it just means that the all devices fit together, even if they don't actually deliver what they're supposed to.
But now you have people complaining that their device doesn't work, charges slowly, transfers slowly because they are using a crappy cable they got from Amazon. Especially for devices that require quite high end cables.
> and you would just buy a real one to work with all your devices.
Except that could kill your Nintendo switch, and it's not like Nintendo is going to change how their hardware works on something that's already been released to the masses.
Just imagine if this had been done in the 90s, we’d be stuck on VGA cables for all video and wouldn’t have hi-def TV. Strict regulation causes ossification.
So, having this kind of directive doesn't block special products, nor has any specific impact on the field evolving healthily. If anything, without this kind of regulation we'd probably still have 95 different charging cable standards.
Apple didn't quite got an approved exception, the previous agreement on micro-USB was essentially a non-binding agreement between the industry and the EU. With the heavy implication that if it's not adhered to, then the EU will make it a regulation or directive.
Apple adhered by letter by making chargers USB and the phone not have USB, contrary to what the agreement wanted to achieve in spirit.
The EU approving this directive is simply the logical end conclusion of apple (and some small fish) not playing ball when asked to.
The regulation does not require devices to only support USB-C, just that they at least support USB-C for charging. They can always have multiple ports. If the 40Gbps offered by USB-C is really not enough for you, then your device is probably big enough that multiple ports does not mess up your device's form factor.
Also, the regulation does not require devices to support USB-C forever, just that all devices support the same open charging standard. That standard can and will evolve over time; maybe not as fast as it would if not regulated, but it's pretty contrived to think it would actually stifle innovation.
No it's not fine, this is just another coercion and consolidation of power where it shouldn't belong. Independent entities cannot innovate on their own because now there's a central apparatus that decides what should be innovated and how, with all the inherent political power struggles of big players, good luck.
EU should be there to set goals, not to dictate implementation.
In essence, they seem to believe that wired charging is mature enough for standardisation but further technologies can be implemented through "Radio Equipment Directive". In the same time, it appears that the wireless charging is unaffected because the tech is new and fast changing, therefore the manufacturers can include whatever wireless charging they see fit.
It really boils down to "No funny cables, why don't you try wireless charging of your liking if USB-C doesn't cut it for you?".
It already has. Tesla's connector is nicer (you can call that subjective but it isn't) and the supercharging network in the US is deploying the clunky standard sort of connector as well.
If EU legislation were universal, that would preclude any future where the superior connector is licensed and takes over from the crappy designed-by-committee alternative, because Tesla would be forced to stop manufacturing it.
Legislators deciding who gets to be VHS and who has to be Betamax is bad, actually.
EU is a densely populated place where having multiple charging networks of incomparable plugs will be horrible.
When you are not happy with decisions the governments make, it usually means that you should be involved in the process of making the decisions.
Europeans don't trust that the industry will always come up with the best solutions for the user, Americans usually don't trust the government doing something well unless it's the military. Let's agree to disagree.
I like that the car plugs are the same everywhere in EU and want it to stay that way and enjoy the Tesla plugs on a trip to USA.
Let's say I invent a better connector tomorrow. Nobody other than me really knows if it's better or not. The only way for me to convince people is to get it out there in the market so people can try it.
How does that work by voting or any other democratic activity?
Others will be unconvinced that it's really better, for the same reason people are skeptical of startup ideas until they become mainstream. So nobody will want to update the standard. So I couldn't release it in the market to prove that it's better, because that would be "lock-in". And the idea would die.
If you're designing such a connector, I'm sure you'll have the car manufacturers on board immediately. After all, your connector is better. Not only a tiny bit better, it's much better.
The EU will obviously be happy to include your better connector, provided that old cars can use it too via an adapter and new cars can use old connectors via an adapter. Then they can without issue transition to the new connector without wasting everyone's time and money.
The committe that handles the Radio Equipment Directive has been fairly reasonable in their reaction time to newer technology coming out. It's not the full blown comission or council, after all.
No, I do not believe that a multi trillion dollar company would spend billions of dollars making a major change to their devices, without having any idea of if it will be better or not.
Whatever internal research that these companies made, to make them want to change their multi billion dollar market like this, they can go public with it first.
Being densely-populated makes it easier to have a range of different plugs, since there will be a range of alternatives, and you'll be able to find the right one for you nearby.
Consider the opposite of a sparsely-populated region, where the next charging point may be 50 miles away. In that case, having a random hodge-podge of competing connectors could have actual consequences.
In practice though, there is not much of an effect either way. All parties have an interest in interoperability: car owners would have adapter to hand if this was a common problem, and charging stations would make themselves available to as many paying customers as possible.
When you have 24 official languages in 27 countries with no physical borders it doesn't end up having an even distribution of plugs but clusters of different types. There are no large wastelands of cheap land where every network can have a station, it's usually one station on each side of the road every 50km on the highways. In cities, a lot of things are retrofitted into medieval city structure so there's not much free space for all your charging needs.
As a result, this will create artificial limits on where people can travel. EU is that much into standardisation because we want to remove these artificial limits created through the thousands years of history.
You don't need to be. "We can't do anything about anything because the system is run by the billionaires and unless you are one, you have no power" narrative is not only false but also harmful.
Please pardon my inadvertent US-centrism! If you live in a country with a functioning democracy, of course it would make sense to participate. Here in the US, average citizens have little to no influence on policy:
This isn't the case in the US, either. How much influence do you think one person in the US, one of hundreds of millions of people, should normally have? Your power to influence policy is obviously going to dilute the further up the chain of government you go. You could involve yourself in local politics where the population of people is much smaller (and consequentially, your influence is much larger), or you could try to become a representative yourself.
National politics in the US is certainly perverse, though it's probably just your US-centrism at work again if you think it's exceptional in this regard.
I was paraphrasing Gilens and Page, from the linked research article. In their words, they found that "economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence".
If there has been subsequent research which contradicts their findings, I would be happy to read it.
> Please pardon my inadvertent US-centrism! If you live in a country with a functioning democracy, of course it would make sense to participate.
This implies that you think that the reason the person believes that they should participate in government is because they don't live in the US and as such, have a functioning democracy and can have an impact on policy. I am asserting that people can have an effect on policy, just that you are more likely to have an effect when you are dealing with local government. This doesn't require a research paper to figure out; There are approximately 334 million Americans. The "average citizen" in this case would have almost no influence whatsoever on policy even in a "functioning democracy" and this is how it is designed. However, if you narrow that down to your state, there is a much lower population and the policies implemented will have a more direct impact on you. If you go even further and look at it from a county, township, or city level, you, by the virtue of their being a small fraction of the people potentially involved in governance, have a much larger effect on policy. The issue is that it seems that people don't want to affect how their town is governed, they want to make mass impact with big changes in policies at a national level.
Special interest groups and economic elites affecting national policy isn't a unique trait to the United States and they are not a valid reason to encourage people against participating in government. You are teaching helplessness which just perpetuates the issue.
This reading of their study is well known to be false; what actually happens is that most of the population agrees on almost all policies, more often than they should, and that's the reason why they're in winning coalitions.
Since the US is education-polarized, rich people are also more left wing than average, as are people who donate to political campaigns, and the more they donate the more left wing they are. (This is called "being Shor pilled".)
Random anecdote: I once got stuck at a friends place in Denmark with my Tesla, because the mobile connector wouldn't work. Turns out despite the voltage and socket being the same, the grounding can vary between countries and the connector wouldn't let me charge (this was back in 2016, I'm not sure if newer mobile connectors are better in that regard)
Is that because some places have 230V and neutral, while others have -115V and +115V (yes like in the US but in Europe)?
There's a single neighborhood in Rome where that happens and car chargers don't work. The "solution" is to request a three-phase 400V connection: the utility company can't deny it and it must be 220V to neutral.
I would like to live in the alternative reality were all AC is three-phase AC; probably it would be uselessly more expensive for normal domestic stuff but it would be quite cooler.
I can imagine that car charging is still too new and fast-moving to enforce a single standard, unlike phone charging, where it's just ridiculous to have 3 separate standards.
On the other hand, you're absolutely right that it doesn't help anyone if your car is incompatible with half of the chargers out there. Are adapter cables an option, perhaps?
I presume you're talking about the J1772/CCS1 adapter that comes for free with every Tesla. This adapter is occasionally handy but it does not allow fast ("super") DC charging. It's strictly a Level 2 AC adapter, which means it takes a few hours to charge your car fully.
The CCS adapter that allows you to supercharge a Tesla at non-Tesla DC superchargers is not (yet) available in the US [0]. Tesla does make them and you can buy them in South Korea, but not in the US.
[0] Except for a dodgy Chinese gizmo which I won't link to because it's reputed not to work reliably.
There is no combined J1772/CCS1 adapter. There are separate passive J1772 and CCS1 adapters, though. The J1772 adapter is obviously really small and easy to use.
I was referring to the CCS adapter that is currently available in South Korea. Its a little heavier, but its also fairly easy to use (well, as easy as CCS usually is). It has become really easy to import them too, thanks to Harumio and other importers. The speeds are 150+kw, and close to 200kw on the newer Model S/X[1]. I expect that official availability will happen sometime this year, but if it doesn't, then presumably a third party will make a suitable passive adapter. Its a ridiculously simple device.
[1] I know officially S/X isn't even supported, but it has been demonstrated to work. Higher speeds are because of the newer 450V battery pack.
Some adapters are more problematic than others. For example if the charger and the vehicle both expect the other side to initiate the charging process and withhold power until some voltage is detected then the adapter may need its own independent power supply to jump-start the charging process. Locks are another problem—some combinations would require the adapter to provide powered locking mechanisms for both sides. None of this makes an adapter impossible, but it could be too expensive or unwieldy to be a practical solution.
That's definitely true. I've used the Tesla chademo adapter and it was a beast. Its heavy, awkward, and the latching mechanism is difficult to fully engage.
The Tesla passive solution to the locking mechanism on their CCS1 passive adapter is as brilliant as it is simple. Just a little springloaded bar that locks the cable onto the adapter if and only if the adapter is inserted into the car. Then the car uses its regular adapter. This works well with CCS1 locking.
The other end of the spectrum are things like the setec adapter or the evhub adapter. Both of those don't have vehicle side locking with CCS1, which is a violation and a potential hazard.
I am "European", whatever that word means, and I definitely don't trust the government to do something well. It happens sometimes that some governments in some countries do some specific thing well. That's definitely not a general rule.
Industry already converged on charging cables though, just Apple is left and they've been moving away from lightning for some time... this legislation is a waste of time.
It's not anyone's business what kind of phone I buy. If chargers pollute so much, just tax them and be done with it.
I'll add to kukx's reason the fact that I can't access some websites anymore because who wants to spend time with bureaucracy so that the website is 100% compliant with GDPR?
Agree 100%. The cookie law is the most visible failure of these regulations. I feel like they should pay me from their own pockets each time I have to click the cookie banner. And by their own pockets I mean the money they got from other sources than taxpayers money. Of course someone will argue that the intentions were good. Often they are! But it does not make it much better.
Most people are more bothered by the annoyance then some nebulous, intangible “tracking“ that will likely never have a visible effect on their lives.
Outside of high tech places like HackerNews, mention the tracking and you’ll get a shrug, mention the cookie banners and you’ll get a “yeah I hate that crap“
How is this different from the American FAA dictating that all aeroplane toilets have to have ashtrays whist at the same time banning smoking on flights[1]?
Should Europeans start hoping the US economy fails so that then FAA has less influence?[3]
Really I don't think this is something that really matters in the grand scheme of things. USB-C is a good enough standard and I don't see Apple coming out with some great new alternative.
From my perspective I have loads of broken Lightning cables but no broken USB-C ones. Also if something is going to break I'd rather the springs be in the cheap cable than the expensive phone socket as with Lightning.
1. Now you might think it's for people who break the smoking rule to have somewhere to put out their fags[2] but the "innovative" solution to that would be the sink.
2. You know that I know you know that's slang for cigarette, so stick to the point at hand please. :P
3. Just in case that's not blindingly obvious, the answer is NO, that would be terrible for everyone involved including both Europeans and Americans.
Imagine different gasoline plugs...that would be stupid, isnt't it? Or different fuel formula for different car models or different AC sockets in the same house...
Also I'm not sure why you hold Asia so dear. You may soon get some centrally planned standards from China in the EV market and not only(i.e online services such tiktok)
I agree with you, but noting that fuel may not be the best example as you have both completely different fuels (like diesel) and different types of normal gas (premium)
Still though, having the same “regular” gas at every single gas station is an underrated benefit!
I was unable to find any record of legislation forcing standardization of gas pump form factors. Also, in my experience different pumps operate at different rates. I think the fact that pumps tend to be quite similar is a result of their mechanical nature, where less precision is required.
> (f) Every retailer and wholesale purchaser-consumer shall equip all gasoline pumps from which gasoline is dispensed into motor vehicles with a nozzle spout that meets all the following specifications:
> (1) The outside diameter of the terminal end shall not be greater than 0.840 inches (2.134 centimeters).
> (2) The terminal end shall have a straight section of at least 2.5 inches (6.34 centimeters).
Fantastic, that’s exactly what I was looking for, thank you! I thought maybe there would be an earlier law, this one is about 100 years after the advent of cars. I suppose we’re close to thirty years past what could reasonably be considered the advent of cell phones, so maybe legislation about now is reasonable.
Would you happier if you were affected by European corporate actions instead?
We live in a global economy, you are constantly affected by things happening thousand of miles away (e.g. Ukraine invasion bumped the price of gas across the world). Not sure why you're conflating that with the fact that these actions are "centrally-planned".
We all affect each other, a lot of American things have become de facto stands. Anyway, be careful what you wish because it might become real and you might find out that Asia is not the libertarian utopia.
> EU is a densely populated place where having multiple charging networks of incomparable plugs will be horrible.
In the short term, yes. In the long term however competition between these different standards will cause consolidation and overall technology improvement. The next step will be regulating wireless charging so that all devices have to use/do the same thing, rinse-wash-repeat.
> Europeans don't trust that the industry will always come up with the best solutions for the user, Americans usually don't trust the government doing something well unless it's the military. Let's agree to disagree.
A better way to think about this is that both "groups" can learn from one another. For example you could say that Europeans should be suspicious about USB-C manufacturers and advocates effectively being granted a monopoly in the name of convenience. Americans should better trust that certainly in the case of infrastructure it makes sense to have a single standard "plug" for electric vehicles because we really need as many people driving them as possible in the most convenient way.
Anyone can produce USB-C chargers. That's not a monopoly. This will effectively enable competition on the charging market, since the big players can't bind their products to their own proprietary chargers anymore.
Have you ever felt the Apple/Microsoft charger to be lacking in some way? Breaking easily, too long cords, too short, wrong color, too expensive? Congratulations now you can make and sell those better chargers. Before, this was not possible.
Yes but all you’re really doing is encouraging everyone to stay locked in to a USB-C market. This isn’t enabling competition in the charging market, it’s eliminating or hamstringing competing markets. You won’t create a new charging apparatus because you’re legally required to use USB-C.
"What if we created a charging cable that did X,Y,Z?"
"That would be cool but we have to use USB-C"
> Have you ever felt the Apple/Microsoft charger to be lacking in some way? Breaking easily, too long cords, too short, wrong color, too expensive?
No not really. In fact I’ve found most third-party products to be godawful. Good luck not buying something fraudulent on Amazon.com. But also, I’m not really sure what you are talking about. Companies sell charging equipment and cords now anyway.
Everything has trade-offs. I’m skeptical of the necessity of this regulation, especially given that the only holdout that anyone cares about is Apple and they’ve been adopting USB-C in all of their products over time. One benefit though will be manufacturers won’t include charging cables with new devices anymore. So that will further reduce waste. Wouldn’t be surprised to see lobbying behind the scenes from companies such as Apple to implement regulations like this so they can save money. I kind of like this as an investor because now you can save money by not including a cable (or maybe you still do and it’s just some cheap one for now) and then you go and up sell wireless chargers instead.
We can copy the US if the cable freedom gives birth to superior cables on the long run. EU stuff is't written on stone, it changes as it needs to.
I guess In Europe we kind of like the idea of being able to overthrow the people in power if they screw us too much. It's much more socially acceptable to burn cars and occupy streets and decapitate politicians than shooting CEO's when you are really not happy with the way things work. It feels like you have control over the stuff going on in your country.
You’re really ignoring the amount of inertia that a deployed fleet of cars creates. You can’t just change standards with the snap of a finger once there are 10M cars in the field with it, once that happens, you’re stuck with that standard for probably decades, as the downsides of changing it become much more acute than the potential upsides.
If the US comes up with the superior cables, EU will simply allow it be optional and the industry will retrofit as needed.
Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around. Old building that definitely don't meet the modern requirements are everywhere. Besides, the states with Cable Freedom will also have all the obsolate cables when the industry finally comes up with the perfect cable.
> Europe is very old, we are used to have old stuff laying around.
So what's the problem with allowing lightning to exist, since as a standard it predated USB-C (and in fact was the impetus for the creation of the latter)? If we allow neighborhoods to keep their old power connectors without retrofit... why not allow lightning to continue to exist?
There's a difference between allowing old installations to continue existing and allowing mass manufacture of the old standard indefinitely. This legislation isn't going to touch anyone's old phones.
All aside, it’s pretending ‘we’ as civilians have any kind of influence in what the EU does. In reality it’s just an opaque process ran by politicians where 99% of the electorate has no idea whatsoever how they got there or even what party they belong to.
> In the long term however competition between these different standards will cause consolidation and overall technology improvement.
If you think that’s a superior solution, then the regulation should actually support it: require that all EV charging connectors have a free published specification, disallow patents on them, and require that interoperability be permitted without cost or other penalty. (e.g. anyone should be able to implement both ends of the Tesla supercharging protocol such that Tesla’s chargers would charge a competing car at the same prices that they charge Tesla’s; similarly, a competing charger should be able to charge a Tesla.)
I'm not opposed to this and personally think it's all up for discussion/debate and it should be discussed and debated. I'm excited to see what develops in this space.
One nitpick would be:
> e.g. anyone should be able to implement both ends of the Tesla supercharging protocol such that Tesla’s chargers would charge a competing car at the same prices that they charge Tesla’s; similarly, a competing chargers should be able to charge a Tesla.
I think this sounds good, but one of the details here is ensuring that other manufacturers are able to actually build the products correctly so a supercharger doesn't light a car on fire or something due to faulty equipment. Who is at fault? How is it prevented? What are the legal agreements? Etc.
On the pricing side though I'd have to strongly disagree. Tesla (or whoever) builds the infrastructure so they should be able to charge what they want. It's about the plug and interoperability of that standard, not infringing on the business model which I think goes too far. If they charge too much money, people won't use them and competitors will continue to emerge (I see new charging stations in Meijer parking lots being put next to Tesla infrastructure). There's no reason in my view to mandate pricing here and I think it would set back EV adoption to do so.
I was set to be all libertarian about this, but your suggestion is probably more level headed.
There should be some common ground. Regulations that encourage innovation (perhaps even with timed financial incentives) while also ensuring that the best ideas are eventually freely adoptable across the board.
Seems like, as with most issues, people take one extreme or the other, when a common sense middle ground could be found with proper planning and forethought.
Disallowing patents is the libertarian solution, though it would be up to the customers to demand published specifications and official support for interoperability.
The original intention of patent system was to encourage open publication of inventions. It even still works that way for some verticals. The issue is that it also produced a system that it is profitable to game and thus there are patent attorneys who get by by writing the patent in as vague terms as is possible to pass by patent reviewers, and in these kind of adversarial situations it is quite obvious that the private sector will win over the government bureaucrats.
> The original intention of patent system was to encourage open publication of inventions.
That is how it was sold to the public. Unfortunately the system was never designed with the proper structure and incentives to ensure that patents were only granted when doing so actually resulted in the publication of accurate details about useful inventions which would not have become known to the public anyway well before the patent period expired.
In practice, if you think you can keep something a trade secret for more than 20 years without it being independently reinvented you'll do that and not file for a patent. Patents are thus useful only in those cases where a patent is expected to be worse for the public than a trade secret, as they inhibit independent reinvention and reverse engineering for the duration of the patent.
On the other hand, companies building wholly proprietary infrastructure is just pure e-waste on the back of the citizens of those countries that ALSO limits innovation.
Imagine a world where Ford cars use a different gas nozzle from a GM product in the US. The average person would have to pick and choose stations and if one were to go out of business, the lesser standard would encounter mass disposal and retrofit, all on the backs of consumers. The intent with these products is generally not innovation...it is lock in and licensing fees. The EU law in case here has a committee that reviews the standard yearly and accepts proposals.
Diesel pump nozzles actually have multiple standards - there's one about the same size as a gas nozzle that's used for diesel cars and pickups, and a bigger one that's used for trucks and buses.
We should also mandate the reduction of open source projects, after all there are too many competing standards. We don’t want code to be wasted now do we? Let’s start by banning the use of Tensorflow
> Tesla's connector is nicer (you can call that subjective but it isn't)
I like the Tesla connector in the US, but in Europe, I'd argue that CCS2 is objectively superior. They need 3-phase power support and the Tesla connector doesn't support that. They also use a different CCS connector from the US. The CCS2 connector uses a latching mechanism that is similar to the proprietary Tesla one. Its simple and very reliable.
The US CCS1 system uses a dual latching mechanism. The cable and the car each have moving parts that are somewhat complicated. The cable side latch is a common failure point. It makes sense, given the desire to retain backward compatiblity with J1772 L1/L2 chargers, but I don't really think that was worth the tradeoff, tbh.
I would say that the IEC 62196-2 used by Tesla in Europe is the most sane EV charging connector design there is. It is standard (albeit in the fast charge mode it is apparently only used by Tesla), the connector is not ridiculously large and the whole mechanical design is derived from industrial power connector that can be used to power entire typical European household.
Sure, the Tesla connector is smaller, and a little sleeker. But from a functionality perspective, the plug types are basically identical. Both allow AC standard charging and DC fast charging. Electric cables aren't that complicated.
Compared to CCS, Tesla made a ton of smart decisions with their charging setup:
- All Teslas have their charging ports at the rear left side. This means that charging cables can be very short. Longer cables would cause tangles, cost more, and be harder to cool.
- Tesla's protocol has built-in payment. You plug in and charge. With CCS it varies. Sometimes you use a credit card. Sometimes you download a mobile app and sign up for some account. Sometimes the planets align and CCS's plug-and-charge works.
- The CCS plug is much bigger. If you look at the connector sizes[1] or adapters[2], the CSS plug is comically huge. Tesla had to redesign the tail lights on the Model S/X to fit CCS Combo 2 ports.
- Every exposed contact is a potential failure point, and CCS exposes more contacts than Tesla's charging port.
- CCS has two different plug dimensions which are used in different regions, so a European CCS vehicle brought to North America will need an adapter (and vice-versa).
- If your vehicle only supports AC charging, you cannot charge with CCS Combo plugs. They won't fit. Since some Teslas were made before the CCS Combo standard took off, older Model S/X's used a CCS Type 2 port. So now every Supercharger in Europe has two plugs: CCS Type 2 & Combo 2.[3]
Several of your points don't have anything to do with CSS and are simply costs of having multiple competing brands on the markets who need to use the same infrastructure (real estate is a very limited resource in many areas).
- Older X/S were never that numerous and shouldn't hold up the vast majority of the population. First movers disadvantage if you like.
- Moving vehicles across the Atlantic is also a tiny tiny use case and already difficult as is.
Yeah. The rollout of domestic wiring standards was pre-EU, and dealing with the entrenched incompatible standardisation gets in the way of the EU goal of a single market in goods and services. They really don't want more arbitrary standards that vary nationally.
Of course, that's not quite the same as the laptop charger question where the fragmentation is between companies and less entrenched. But still.
No, EU uses a single plug, it is called "Type C" (no, not USB-C).
What you might find in some poorer regions in EU is old plugs that were there pre-EU, or prestandardization.
I can say that, because Brexit happened, I have no clue what those were thinking when designing their own gigantic plug.
This is just not true. Denmark and Italy use their own plugs; Ireland, Malta, and Cyprus use the British plug; and the heart of the EU is divided between French-style and Schuko plugs. (Switzerland, though outside the EU, also uses its own plugs.)
As I understand it, EU moves to standardise plugs failed in the 90s.
> But Italy has the "normal" (schuko or French) plug. The old one (three holes in line) are in older houses mostly.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. I was in Italy on Thursday and also early in May. My very modern hotel rooms mostly had Italian three-hole sockets, with a single token 'standard' euro socket provided at the table, that nevertheless didn't always accept my (French-style) laptop cable because the prongs were too thick.
Also, flashy modern hotels aside, I'd say most houses in Italy are "older houses". The three-hole socket is definitely extremely common in Italy in my experience. In fact, there's two incompatible three-hole Italian sockets - a larger one for most appliances, and a smaller one for lights.
No. Type C is limited to 2.5 A ungrounded appliances. For regular (16 A, grounded) sockets, half of EU use type E and other half type F. Fortunately, there is CEE 7/7 plug, which is compatible with both type E and type F sockets.
They're all a part of the NEMA standard. The different plugs denote different capacities of the circuit and the requirements of the load. That way you can't accidentally plug a 30A device in a 15A circuit or you can't plug a 120V device into a 240V plug. If the wiring to your stove top is only 30A but you bought a 50A stove, you shouldn't be able to plug it in and just hope the circuit breaker trips before the wires melt to let you know you did it wrong.
Its not like there's a plug for Samsung TVs, a different plug for Sonos sound bars, a different plug for a Sony alarm clock, a different plug for a Singer sewing machine, etc. They're all going to be a NEMA 5-15 plug since all of these things are ~120V and use less than 15A.
This is the case I try to make to friends and relatives (non-EV owners) who insist that a common plug is a prerequisite to EV ownership.
Standardizing against Tesla at any earlier point would have been a gift on a silver platter for legacy auto by slowing EV adoption, and it's Tesla's freedom to innovate that is why we're even having this discussion instead of theoretical questions about what EVs might be like in the future.
I usually tell them to let Tesla solve the remaining edge cases (semis, trailer hauling, and charge speeds comparable to ICE fill-ups) before we start regulating. Setting things in stone now would be like standardizing on DSL as the only last-mile broadband in 2004. We don't want to do that.
That's just impossible. Filling a 100 kWh "tank" in one minute requires 6 MW of power, plus all the power that goes into heat. The only solution would be replacing batteries on the fly but Tesla discontinued it.
Moving stuff is inherently faster than chemical reactions (unless you're talking about explosions).
The problem is not just the time to charge a single car but the capacity in cars/hour.
First, if a car takes five times longer to charge, you need a lot more space to cover the needs for peak days. This may not be a problem on highways (or in the US) but space in Europe is much more limited.
Second, a smallish 6-pump filling station serves 150-200 cars per hour. An equivalent charging station would need 12-15 MW which means working at 40 kV.
Dealing with peak days is easy for filling stations, you just request gasoline trucks more frequently. For charging stations you need to build infrastructure that might hardly exist in more rural places, it's the same as sneakernet vs broadband.
It's hard to calculate how many charging stations will be needed. Most EV owners plug their cars in at home and wake up every day with a full charge. They only use charging stations for road trips. Also charging stations can be installed in far more places than gas stations. There are no hazardous fumes or massive fire risks. They don't require nearly as much maintenance or staff. For these reasons it's common to see charging stations in parking garages, in front of hotels, or even next to the beach[1].
The problem is the peak demand on the road trips, such as everybody doing hundreds of km on the same days to go on vacation. Using the car for your summer holidays is quite more common in Europe than in the US for example.
> If EU legislation were universal, that would preclude any future where...
Your crystal ball seems broken. You could have said the exact same thing about micro-usb for phone chargers, yet somehow we ended up in the present.
Hint: Your supposed critical flaw is incredibly obvious. So either everyone but you is an idiot or just maybe the people making laws have thought of that too...
I would rather have a shared and slightly less optimal cable, than a unique and "nicer" cable. USB-C is the perfect example, you can argue that lightning cable is actually nicer, but being able to charge all my different devices with a single cable is far nicer.
If every company thought like Tesla/Apple, we'd quickly go down a very untenable road.
> Legislators deciding who gets to be VHS and who has to be Betamax is bad, actually.
They didn't make the decision. It's more like legislators observing that Betamax is failing and deciding that it's in everyone's best interests to tell Sony that they have to adopt VHS instead of creating confusion in the marketplace.
> Tesla's connector is nicer
Tesla's system only goes up to 400 volts. CCS goes up to 800 volts. The higher voltage supports faster charging.
(This is similar to Betamax's critical flaw. The smaller, more elegant Betamax tape compared to the clunky VHS tape meant that VHS could record 6 hours on a tape when Betamax was limited to about 3.5 hours on a tape. It also meant that feature length films were often recorded at slower tape speeds, thus meaning that prerecorded VHS tapes were often a better quality than the Betamax version.)
CCS spec limits are actually 1000V and 500A. Electrify America uses 350A units, hence the 350 kW chargers (1000V x 350A). Lucid battery packs are 924V to maximize CCS capability.
DC Fast charging has to match pack voltage, so with 400ish volt pack voltage Tesla gets big charging speed by providing extreme amperage. CCS is limited to 500A, so the best way to provide really fast charging is higher pack voltages.
Higher voltage does have some benefits around heat and losses, but also has downsides like cost of electronics and installations over 600V generally require special electrical licensing.
It's hard to deny the tesla connector is a lot nicer to work with (especially V3 with thin, liquid cooled cables), but I still wish my model 3 sr+ had CCS like euro cars. I'd love to be able to have more charging options.
I'm not sure that Tesla's connector is a limiting element there. The Tesla system can also go to higher amperages than CCS, which is an advantage. For example, the F150 Lightning charging rate is hampered by its 400 volt CCS system. It can't do more than 200kw. That's creating a lot of the pressure to move to 800 volt.
Tesla doesn't have a similar limitation and can do 250-300kw on the existing 400-450V cars.
It's more like legislators observing that Betamax is failing and deciding that it's in everyone's best interests to tell Sony that they have to adopt VHS instead of creating confusion in the marketplace.
Or like 1996 when Apple was failing and everyone should have been forced to standardize on Windows.
>> I's absolutely true that Tesla's EV connector is better than CCS, and it's a pity that Tesla lost that battle.
Currently working at a company that makes CCS chargers. Can confirm the standard is an absolute shit show, the cables are heavy, and the plugs are a giant pain in the ass. But hey, it's the standard so that's what we make. Oh, and why TF do we have a PowerLine Communication chip to talk to the vehicle over (non-power) signal wires? A few CAN messages would have done the job. One of the stupidest communication standards ever.
Tesla's connector uses CAN over signal wires, and it uses the same power pins for both AC and DC which makes the connector light and sleek. If you think VHS is worse than Betamax, CCS is more worse than Tesla's connector.
Different countries already have many different rules for autos. That's why it's difficult to be a world-wide auto manufacturer: you have to comply with so many different rules from different countries. That's just the cost of doing business and has been for decades.
If Apple believes USB-C is really that bad (which I don't think they do) - then they have the option of creating a handset only for sale in Europe or they can remove all charging ports and go wireless charging. I bet they go with USB-C charging and wireless charging.
>It already has. Tesla's connector is nicer (you can call that subjective but it isn't) and the supercharging network in the US is deploying the clunky standard sort of connector as well.
you know what's even nicer? Being able to charge your car at any charging station and not just the ones built by your manufacturer.
Imagine if you could only fill up your gas tank at specific gas stations that support your tank opening.
>Legislators deciding who gets to be VHS and who has to be Betamax is bad, actually
Interesting example. Betamax was technologically superior, but lost out due to marginally higher costs. What makes you think Tesla's connector wouldn't suffer the same fate?
It makes sense for cars to have a standard connector so that they may be charged without any problem at any public charging station. After all, there is a standard fuel nozzle for ICE vehicles.
On the other hand, this requirement to have an USB-C connector is pretty useless to downright counter-productive as it will indeed prevent innovation. It's just political hand-waving.
I second this. I'm frequently using the volkswagen ID.3 and there is no way to unplug it unless you unlock it from charging station with the card you find it in the car (at least in Berlin).
The locking feature is misguided. There should absolutely be a mechanical interlock to prevent unplugging under load. But no key should be required to unplug a home charger, and no key should be needed to plug in a charger once the charge port is open. As I see it, the only security goals should be:
1. At a public charger, one should have to authenticate to _either_ the car or the charger to interrupt an active charging session.
2. When using a portable charger of the sort that is owned by the car’s owner, one should not be able to unplug the charger and thus steal it if one cannot authenticate to the car.
And that’s it. You should be able to unplug someone else from a public charger that can reach multiple parking spaces once it finishes charging.
The CCS2 standard used in Europe and most of the world locks the cable similarly to Tesla.
The CCS1 standard locks the cable using a little flap that folds down on top of the CCS1 latch to hold it in place. Its every bit as clumsy as it sounds, but it does mean there is a locked cable.
In the USA all modern electric cars also use the normal standard, except for Tesla. There were a few early offshoots and Tesla had good reason to come up with their own connector initially (no other plug could transfer that much power!) but these days everything has been pretty much consolidated.
For charging your car at Tesla chargers that haven't been upgraded to the standard yet there are adaptors available from Tesla plugs to standard fast charging plugs.
Older cars may need their weird custom connections but everything else has been pretty much been standardised. I don't know how much the EU decision has affected this, but it's not an EU exclusive feat.
There's this thing called Brussels effect where manufacturers pick to default to EU requirements instead of having different supply chains unless they absolutely have to.
EU don't like the idea of manufacturers locking down their users through different standards. EU is a densely populated place with limited natural resources and free space, therefore cables piling up or 10 different types of charging stations are problems that EU cannot afford. EU trash being shipped to poorer countries is already a serious problem for example.
Good to hear that in the US only Tesla was the outlier and the industry acted responsibly but unless regulated you can't guarantee that it will be like that or stay like that.
Businesses love to lock down their users, Tesla chargers are a major selling point for Tesla and from EU perspective having multiple charging networks that cannot be made interoperable without a substantial modifications is a no-no.
I don't really get this trash argument even though I hear it over and over. I throw away a higher volume of stuff in one or two average days than all the wall warts and phone cables I've ever owned probably add up to. I've been on smart phones since Blackberry, and I don't think all of the chargers and cables I've used over the two decades combined add up to a single trash can full.
> I throw away a higher volume of stuff in one or two average days than all the wall warts and phone cables I've ever owned probably add up to.
I would think ‘mass’ is a better metric to use than ‘volume’. Also, it’s not only the waste, but also the work needed to make it, and I would guess that’s a lot harder for electric chargers than for, say, the plastic bags that take up the bulk of the volume of trash.
Also, “Others are worse” isn’t a strong argument. Some of the large contributors to trash may not be completely unavoidable (example: plastic packaging). Because of that, it’s not possible to significantly reduce the amount of waste by making a few cuts on the largest contributors of trash. You have to do it by making lots of small cuts. This is one of them, and also a relatively easy gain.
I would think volume is a better metric because landfills don't really much care about mass.
If you wanted to save trash you'd probably go after packaging. Ban disposable water bottles (or something less drastic like taxing them extra) and there's 50 lifetimes of wall warts per person per annum.
This just isn't really an enviromental problem. Or if it is, it's so far down the scale as to be pointless to prioritize over almost anything. It's really about competition.
> I would think volume is a better metric because landfills don't really much care about mass.
Most EU countries have actually outlawed landfills in favor of waste-to-energy systems. [1] Of course waste-to-energy only works for stuff like plastics, not for electronics which you'd rather want to disassemble carefully to recover the precious metals.
> If you wanted to save trash you'd probably go after packaging.
Which the EU does too. There is legislation underway (or possibly already passed) to outlaw many types of single-use plastic items. Everyone switching from plastic straws to paper straws may actually be another case of Brussels effect.
> it's so far down the scale as to be pointless to prioritize over almost anything
The thing is, from experience we know that these legislations take so long to enact and enforce that you cannot just start with the biggest items, wait for it to be done, and then move to the next biggest item. You need to tackle many possible avenues for waste reduction at once.
True, and tbh, the adapters don't have to be particularly clunky. The CCS1 -> Tesla connector adapter is generally pretty elegant. Its not as nice as the Tesla connector itself, of course.
Sadly, the US standard (CCS1) was heavily influenced by a desire for backward compatibility with J1772. Its not a great standard in itself.
> Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is what happens if better solutions are found. Will EU block innovation?
The EU has no problem with updating to improved standards. First there was USB-Mini-B, then USB-Micro-B, now USB-C. I would expect some different connector to replace it in a about a decade and 100% wireless in two decades roughly.
Mini-B (2000) had serious reliability problems, and would often damage the device rather than the cable. Micro-B (2007) was a pretty smart & necessary response. USB-C (2014) elegantly encompassed the additional high-speed data-connectivity that the hideous huge SuperSpeed USB Micro-B (2008) tacked on, & added significant future-proofing/adaptability (alt-modes).
I have a hard time imagining much advantage beyond USB-C. It's pretty mechanically fit & reliable, it has huge bandwidth (I think DisplayPort alt-modes can do 80Gbps?), it can transmit 240W in Extended Power Range variants. Someday perhaps. But I also think this might be here to stay for a long long time.
I would bet the industry will invent something to replace it anyway, even if there's no good reason for the change. Or maybe there will be some fundamental leap making 80 Gbps as irrelevant as 9600 bps are today.
Side note, there's some really really cheap fiber optic DisplayPort cables out there. They work, they're whatever length you want, mine were ~$0.60/foot. My monitors are 4k60 & 2k170; all resolutions run great. I feel like we're not too far off from fiber maybe happening for real.
USB-C only came to light because of the out of standard Intel's lightning cable. Same thing for x86 vs arm, you can't really block one in favour of the other.
Innovation is overrated. And standardising is not blocking.
What we need more urgently than innovation is to stop creating so much waste, extracting so much stuff from the earth, and in general reduce consumption. Standardisation accomplishes at least some of that.
> Innovation is overrated. And standardising is not blocking.
Hard disagree? Both lightning and USB C were massive improvements in durability compared to Micro USB - I'd argue lightning is still better in that regard, because there's no thin piece inside the phone that can break (did phone repair, and 99% of the time a "broken" iphone port was just stuck lint).
USB C is not universally better then then Micro, namely it has a much larger footprint both on the connector side and the PCB.
> Will EU block innovation?
So my question is - if there's a new USB standard connector that's smaller, or is inside-out for better durability - is it now prevented from being used?
Granted this isn't the fault of the connector, but USB-C is certainly a mess. My Nintendo Switch uses USB-C charging, but I can't use my MacBook charger for it. There are different cables, ratings, etc. "make everything USB-C" is asking for confusion. As much as I hate having a different cable for every device, at least when I pick up a (Apple-branded) lightning cable, I know it will work correctly for my iPhone.
Isn't the switch a notorious outlier and oddball with respect to its usb-c implementation though? I think it's more just that Nintendo screwed up one product than the standard is bad.
It's certainly the most popular example of poor implementation. But one could argue that USB-C isn't even implemented and they just used the connector/form factor for their cable. I recall the RPI4 also having issues early on with power over USB-C.
But that's precisely my problem with this - if we're forcing every device to merely adopt a USB-C port, that does nothing to ensure they're actually using USB-C specifications or interoperable. Game System X and Phone Y may only work with USB-C cables/chargers X and Y, which satisfy the requirement without fixing the compatibility problem.
> …if we're forcing every device to merely adopt a USB-C port, that does nothing to ensure they're actually using USB-C specifications or interoperable.
You certainly need more than just the physical port. IMHO the minimum reasonable requirement would be that the device must charge at near the maximum supported rate (minimum of the device's, cable's, and charger's advertised rates) with any combination of compliant charger & cable. There wouldn't be much point in mandating the use of USB-C ports otherwise.
> My Nintendo Switch uses USB-C charging, but I can't use my MacBook charger for it.
Then I guess you got one from the first hardware revision. I have a 2018 Switch (second hardware revision as far as I understand), and I have in the past charged it successfully with Apple chargers and Lenovo chargers.
I really like what USB-C has done for peripherals and non-iphone devices, but I agree with you.
I'd be fine with a new USB-D that fixed all these issues. USB-C is just mostly better than the other alternatives for Android and charging laptops. Its far from perfect.
I've read that USB-C is a durability improvement over micro USB. This surprised me because I've never had the USB port on a phone fail on me until I got a USB-C phone.
How about non-removable batteries and unrepairable phones? Many phones would be still ok, but the non-removable (cheaply) battery means that they get replaced prematurely, because the cost of replacement is overlapping the price of a low/mid tear phones. Back in the day, you pulled the back cover off, put a new batter in, and the phone was as good as new. Same with other types of repair, especially the kinds where manufacturer just replaces the whole assembly just because of one small part malfunctioning.
It will probably last for very long consider 24 wire of type c is a lot compares to 4 of 3.5mm jack. And it can actually be repurposed by changing the protocol (software) ?
Probably until someday that 24 physical wire isn't enough for a phone. (but the iPhone don't even use the usb3 yet, why did it even need these bandwidth?)
This is a flawed comparison because the use cases for the former examples are very limited in comparison to USB C which is arguably evolving rapidly still.
You could imagine if we had formed such a standard around USB A in the 90s and how it might have blocked the already high friction establishment of USB C and thunderbolt 3 standards.
USB C currently seems more mature than USB A, so I can see where things ar ea bit subjective here, but it's not really possible to see where unrestricted development would have put us.
I think I would have been more comfortable with simply banning lightning and micro USB than restricting to only USB C.
This regulation is about charging - so power, not data / thunderbolt. And when it comes to charging USB C can delvier 100W, which is enough for any small gadget, phone, etc.
The 3.5mm jack is not that good in my opinion. It fails too quickly. Less than a year for a portable device that bumps around in your pocket and reconnect a couple times a day. Now I still prefer it in many situations to bluetooth with its latency and packet drop issues, but I do think that a better jack could be made and is worth making.
As for suggestions for improvements: it should not be able to spin, because spinning wears it down. Second, maybe some kind of latch to lock it into place.
in so far as they are
capable of being recharged via wired charging, shall:
so you can have all the funny cables you want, as long as you provide the USB-C plug
If there is no wired charging, there is no problem of funny cables.
but companies are free to experiment all the kinds of wired charging they want, it's just more convenient to have a standard and they'll comply happily I guess, now that they are forced by the law and can stop competing on stupid stuff like charging cables.
There is a huge question of what exactly “are capable of being recharged via wired charging” means. Does the hidden Lightning connector on Apple Watch that most consumers don't even know is there count?
That is good because I think as late as three years ago there was still at least one "laptop" (possibly more, only one I have heard of) which were heavy desktop replacement that required two power bricks during some gaming.
What if Apple finally comes out with wired mag safe for the iPhone? Does they count as wireless? Or would it be illegal in Europe because a wire was still involved even if the connection was magnetic?
Since they've been using Lightning for about 10 years now, I'd say there's other things that are inhibiting their innovation. I suspect it has more to do with third-party accessory manufacturers. Unless you're suggesting that connector innovation requires at least a 10 year iteration cycle?
Yeah, people generally don’t want to have to throw out all that stuff after a short period of time, and after a long period, they’ve got even more money invested in that setup, so if it’s not broken… there’s just not really much of a compelling benefit to change types from the perspective of most normal people, and there are concrete downsides in the form of money sunk into it.
Anyway, I like USB-C more, I have to carry them anyway, so it’d eliminate one cable when I travel. We’re as close as I’ve ever seen to having the one cable to rule them all, which is pretty cool.
USBC can be made to be "MagSafe". When Apple only sold laptops with USB-C ports there were a bunch of MagSafe knockoffs sold for laptops. Although most of the time they would break eventually but it's not impossible. If it just was a special cord as long as you could use a regular USBC cord it seems like it would be compliant but IANAL.
Those solutions aren’t very good, so I doubt Apple would go that route.
Frankly, I’m expecting the lightning port to be replaced with a purely inductive/magnetic solution eventually, there probably will not even be a receptacle for it, just a wireless contact to the phone from the wire like how the Apple Watch can only charged.
I’m guessing in that case, they would be exempt from providing a usb-c port since the phones would be technically purely wireless by that point. At that point, other vendors will follow and the EU will mandate Qi as the standard wireless charging solution since the USB-C mandate will be obsolete.
I'd guess that they'd be required to implement both. If there's a USB-C charging option, I don't think the EU would prevent an additional magsafe charging. They havent banned wireless charging, for example. This is to insure an essential minimum compatibility (I hope/as I see it).
It would be nice if we could limit new standards to once every 5-10 years. At which time people can submit new ideas for standardization approval and then the best one gets picked and everyone is required to switch. Backwards compatibility would probably score a lot of points.
Speaking of cars and standardization, I'm still waiting for the European Union to put the steering wheel on the left side of the car and while we're at it, make it mandatory to drive on the right side of the road.
Is your point that since there exist a standard which occurred without government intervention, then the government should never intervene to create any standards?
Standards are a good thing but I’m not sure that we have reached this point where USB-C is functionally the best. If we could completely eliminate on all other types of connectors on not just phones but computers then I would say it’s time to standardize. Unfortunately on my computer if I want a 4K resolution and frame rate that is way 300 hz then is it even possible that can be done over a USB-C connector? Hopefully some expert can chime in but display port or hdmi 2.1+ or multiple of those cables is what is used typically, and if USB-c worked perfectly why isn’t that already replacing every single port on a computer? Phones will eventually be as fast or faster than the current computers, so why implement a limitation when it feels like phones are still at the baby steps in phone evolution? That is just data transfer and I’m no expert but I’m not certain either than charging has reached it’s final form either. Am I wrong, is the USB-c connector capable of infinite data transfer rate as long as your cable is good enough?
> Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is what happens if better solutions are found. Will EU block innovation?
Usb typec wire from 65A(non e-marked wire) to 240A(the latest standardized e-marked wire) uses literally the same plug.
Typec is the header but not the protocol. Even China phone vendor's proprietary high speed charging protocol use typec wire. And Intel's tb4 wire also use a type c wire. (the bandwidth of tb4 is definitely overkill for every phone ever made on the world for now)
Force use of typec header and baseline charging protocol prevent innovation is just bs consider this didn't even prevent apple from making a MFA e-marked typec cable.(Or they don't want this to pass because they actually want to do this again?)
> the bandwidth of tb4 is definitely overkill for every phone ever made on the world for now
That depends on what you're doing with it. It would not be very strange to power a VR headset with a phone, which could easily get into that bandwidth range.
I'm considering TBT3/4 for our VR headset's tethered mode. It's a bit of a pain to implement, but the data rate is worth it.
For reference, we need 2-4 lanes of DP HBR3 (depending on compression) + PCIe Gen3x4 for the camera passthrough. TBT3/4 could do it over a single cable.
Feeds into the nightmare that is implementing that entire ecosystem though...
The tech for wireless charging is not really that new and isn't really changing a large amount. My Nokia 920 uses the same charging standard as the latest iPhones. iPhones can charge on the old charger I have, the 920 can charge on an iPhone charger. That phone came out a decade ago.
The constitution gives US congress the right to set standards for weights and measures, which unless you use a very strict reading says they can set charging standards. I wish they would. Tesla (and Nissan) as early movers 10 years ago can be forgiven for not adopting a standard charger, but now they need to update to the standard. (IIRC both are planning on it)
If by “strict reading” you mean “any reading at all”, I would agree.
I’m not sure how the legal power to say “the unit of mass called the ‘gram’ shall be defined as the mass of a cube of pure water, one centimeter on each side” allows you to say “anybody that manufactures a phone must include the following physical and logical features.” If you go off that definition, you’re basically ceding pretty much unlimited power to the government.
For cars, we have public metering devices that measure units of stuff and charge money. This makes it fall into the category of metering devices used in trade. And we do regulate those almost universally. You can’t just put a different shape nozzle on a gas pump, for instance.
Standardization of metering devices used in commerce is directly in the purview of Weights and Measures regulation.
For example, NIST Weights and Measures division regulates the nozzle on the dispenser used for gasoline in the US.
> Each retail dispensing device from which fuel products are sold shall be equipped with a nozzle spout having a diameter that conforms with the latest version of SAE J285, “Dispenser Nozzle Spouts for Liquid Fuel Intended for Use with Spark-Ignition and Compression Ignition Engines.”
Ensuring accurate metering in the context of commerce is within the scope of "To … fix the Standard of Weights and Measures". The specific form of the nozzle clearly is not, but they might justify it on the basis of some other enumerated power—the interstate commerce clause is frequently (ab)used for this sort of thing. Nothing technically requires every regulation produced by the NIST Weights and Measures division to be grounded exclusively in the Weights and Measures clause, though one could be forgiven for making that assumption.
As dpratt remarked earlier[0], any interpretation which would deem nozzle size—or the specific form of an electrical connector—to be covered by the Weights and Measures clause of the Constitution would effectively cede unlimited power to the federal government. What couldn't they regulate under such broad rules?
I'm not saying that the regulatory power in this case is derived solely from the weights and measures clause, I'm countering golemotron's suggestion that it's a wholly unrelated topic. It's a topic so closely relevant to weights and measures that the regulatory division that currently regulates them bears that title.
It's an overreach. "A pound is 16 ounces" is not the same as "cakes shall only be 5 ounces," i.e., a standard of measure does not extend to regulation of what is measured and what measures are permitted. An originalist court could fix this.
These are very fundamental consumer protection regulations that have been solidly cemented in western civilization for many centuries now.
>not extend to regulation of [...] what measures are permitted.
That was exactly the point of that clause. The colonies all had their own system of measurement and it was a mess trying to do business. Now, congress did very little about it, but the founders intentionally reserved the right for them to fix that problem.
The problem with your formulation is that there is no limiting principle. Perversely, the government could rule that a pregnant person is a metering device for gestation and establish standards.
Society claiming this is wrong and being correct is exactly balanced by society claiming whales aren't fish and being incorrect.
(Whales are fish because they're descendants of fish and are more closely related to salmon than sharks are. The same goes for you. You're also a fish.)
It's just really not clear to me that regulators need to be mandating product design.
I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice.
Twenty years ago, we really DID have a snarl of competing and proprietary phone ports. It was a mess -- Blackberry chargers didn't work with Palm; most WinMo devices had their own ports; etc. It was ugly.
Now, pretty much everything is either USB or Lightning. This is good! What problem is the EU solving here?
This always gets bought up, and it's always wrong.
> I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice.
They didn't write the law as "you must use USB-C" They wrote the law as "The industry experts need to pick A standard for charging, and all manufacturers should respect that choice"
They are welcome to change it going forward, they just have to agree and consolidate.
This is not correct so far as I can tell -- the amendment to directive 2014/53/EU [1] says
> Hand-held mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones, headsets, handheld videogame consoles and portable speakers, in so far as they are capable of being recharged via wired charging, shall:
> (a) be equipped with the USB Type-C receptacle, as described in the standard EN IEC 62680-1-3:2021 ‘Universal serial bus interfaces for data and power - Part 1-3: Common components - USB Type-C TM Cable and Connector Specification’, which should remain accessible and operational at all times;
To switch to a new charger type would require legislative action, not just industry experts changing their mind. That said, I actually strongly prefer this approach to allowing an industry self-regulating group to make these decision.
This is the truth of the matter. Apple has been dragging their feet on switching away from lightning.
Why? No idea. It's a much slower standard, and puts the wearing parts in the port instead of the cable. USB-C is designed by committee, sure, but the port itself is better than lightning in nearly every consumer metric there is.
USB-C is perfectly fine, and I'm happy to switch, but let's not go overboard. Lightning is still arguably better than USB-C.
USB-C exists because Apple was in the process of creating Lightning. Also, in my experience, you seem to have the fragility point backward: the nub on lightning cables may break, but the port is fine, while the reverse is true for USB-C, where the fragile bit is in the port.
Isn't USBC more fragile because of the middle piece that lives in the port? Lightning has always felt sturdier to me, though not enough to warrant carrying different types of cables..
The middle piece is thin and does look fragile, but you can't put any real side load on it. The outer wall of the connector takes that force before you can put any real force on the middle. Unless you're jamming a flathead screwdriver or something in it.
Beyond that, the springloaded contacts are on the cable end with type-c, with lightning it's inside the phone. I don't think it's a particularly common failure mode, but having less moving parts in the expensive bit is generally a good idea.
Apple has repeatedly said their phones are so thin that they don't have room for a USB-C port. This of course is total bullshit because many phones as thin or thinner than iPhones have USB-C ports.
Yep. Apple came out with their own connector because USB Mini (where everyone else wanted to go) sucked. We got a robust, flippable connector. All in all, using only two kinds of connectors over 14 years (so far) seems far better than the industry average (proprietary, mini, micro, C)
"Any technological developments in wired charging can be reflected in a timely adjustment of technical requirements/ specific standards under the Radio Equipment Directive. This would ensure that the technology used is not outdated."
"At the same time, the implementation of any new standards in further revisions of Radio Equipment Directive would need to be developed in a harmonised manner, respecting the objectives of full interoperability. Industry is therefore expected to continue the work already undertaken on the standardised interface, led by the USB-IF organisation, in view of developing new interoperable, open and non-controversial solutions."
I don't see how this is relevant -- this is a statement of principle. The fact remains that to update the standard, the "timely adjustment" would be made by the legislative body. Don't let the passive voice fool you here; this is not some dynamic industry-led process, it's just a non-binding commitment to update the regulations if the technology advances.
Interesting, I may be out of date then. Previously all the RED proposals called for a common charger, but did not directly specify the charger required.
It seems like wireless charging still falls into that category (they require some form of interoperability by 2026, but do not state the exact form).
> With respect to radio equipment capable of being recharged via means other than wired charging, the Commission is empowered to adopt delegated acts in accordance with Article 44 in order to amend Annex Ia in the light of technical progress, and to ensure the minimum common interoperability between radio equipment and their charging devices, by:
(a) introducing, modifying, adding or removing categories or classes of radio equipment;
(b) introducing, modifying, adding or removing technical specifications, including references and descriptions, in relation to charging interface(s) and charging communication protocol(s), for each category or class of radio equipment concerned.’;
So the commission can adopt new standards trough a much lighter executive process. It does not require new legislation to update the standard.
It's still not clear that having this be regulated is better.
We don't have a port problem. We used to have one, but it went away. It sure LOOKS like Apple will, eventually, transition away from Lightning on its own anyway.
So why have regulators weigh in here at all? What's the point? What value is added?
Light bulb sockets are actually a great example for the downsides of standardization, because they’re super suboptimal for LED bulbs, and are a large part of the reason for the transformers on many of the new bulbs burning out way before their rated lifetime. A better LED socket would provide better heatsinking/dissipation opportunities.
MR16 is a 12V DC standard so it does not need a transformer, in theory it's much better for LEDs, and yet we hardly ever see it used even in new builds.
Every time I rented a place with MR16, like 1/3 of all sockets in the ceiling were dead, the power supply was inside the false ceiling and it was not possible to fix without making a hole. Needless to say lardlord need much motivating to fix anything.
Also, it;s not illegal to install random non-standard bulbs -> my last apartmentblock was built with some special, great, proprietary and patented LED-spesific socket. Guess what happened? 15 years on, the lamps started failing, and the manufacturere dropped production of anything for that socket!
Now they need to replace like a thousands light fittings across the entire block, there is no way to get replacements. Some of them are in awkward places and will require a special vehicle to reach.
Yeah, there’s a ton of inertia, with the standard socket so well entrenched. That’s pretty crazy about the proprietary socket. Seems like the big industry players should get a voluntary standards group together and make a big push.
If this standardization happened in 1999, would we now all be walking around with the original [large] USB-B or DC barrel jacks on our phones? (Those were the standardized connectors of the day.)
Do we believe given the track record of a new connector being introduced more frequently than once every 5 years just within the USB standardization process, that we've somehow reached the end of that road in practical terms? If we've reached the end of the road, by all means we could standardize and say "you have to use the pinnacle of USB connector type".
It has been working quite well in many electronic devices for decades...
I don't see the usefulness of discussing things that have not happened.
Is USB-C bad?
That's the question you should be interested in.
“The best is the enemy of the good.”
Saying that choices should never be made because we don't know what the future brings, is the same of saying that there's no point in living, because we are all going to die.
Of course they did not settle on USB-B in 1999 because there weren't billions of devices using it and it was relatively new technology.
Not all that many companies are doing work for cable standards to begin with, and personally - as a consumer - I very much welcome the standardization on usb-c.
The companies that are doing work on communication standards aren't normally selling the kind of devices covered here to consumers. It's more business to business and military applications. Further, charging in particular is a different beast than communication in general - you're not doing anything other than sending current down the line to fill a battery. there's only so many ways to do that, and I think it makes sense to consolidate them.
Finally - the requirement only states that the device must include a usb-c port for charging. It makes no limitations on manufacturers including additional ports. So even if a direct to consumer device wanted to include a new port - they absolutely could, they just still have to allow filling the battery from usb-c.
I hate to be snarky on HN, but are we from the same planet?
In the vast majority of devices you accept what the manufacture gives you or you are out of luck, especially when everything these days is protected by some kind of intellectual property.
This excuse is old and tired and tends to ignore that large manufactures purposefully make the customer experience worse for higher profits.
Or instead of that, people could use their legal and democratic rights to enforce a standardization.
If you don't like it, feel free to vote for something different. But apparently the people in the EU disagree with you, and believe that the world would be better off if they enforced a standard.
> Do you really need the government to make your choices for you?
A user does not have a choice to use USB-C with certain devices right now. That is why there is a law, that now allows users to choose that.
If Apple doesn't like it, then I guess they can of their own free choice, choose to leave the EU.
They do not own the EU. They can take the deal, follow the law, or shut down in the EU. Thats their choice to sell to that market.
A user is free to use a device with USB-C right now. A user is also not free to buy an iPhone that runs Android. Should the government also force all phones to support Android?
I’m also not free to buy an iPhone with pink polka dots. Should the EU force companies to make that? I want all cars to support CarPlay. Shouid that be legislated?
The “people” didn’t vote for this. The same lawmakers who thought that an 11 chapter 99 section law would solve privacy issues and all it did was force users to deal with cookie pop ups.
Yet one company made a 15 line rules change about tracking (Apple) and the entire ad industry had to do more to clean up their act and have admitted in their quarterly reports that it is impacting their business.
> A user is free to use a device with USB-C right now
No they cannot use it with certain devices. Which is what the legislation is for. Then they will have that ability with all devices in the EU.
Apple is also free to make devices doing whatever they want, and sell them in a different country.
> Should the EU force companies to make that?
Apple isn't forced to make anything. They can simply of their own choosing, leave that market. It is their choice to sell to that market, and they can feel free to leave if they don't like the official representatives of the EU using their official power to legislate.
All these arguments about choice are ignoring that it is the choice of the EU to control its own market, and it is Apple's choice to sell there. They are free to leave if they don't like the laws that the lawmakers create.
> I want all cars to support CarPlay. Should that be legislated?
If you can get enough support among lawmakers, feel free to talk about the benefits and cons of your proposal.
Well the biggest reason is because there are a much larger amount of people and law makers who would prefer simply stopping at cord compatibility, and cord compatibility is much easier to implement, and much less disruptive, than more extreme and absurd examples.
Society does not have to do the most extreme thing possible, in every situation.
Instead, society can pick and choose. We can look for easy wins, and do the things that are easy to implement and not do the things that are harder to implement.
In fact, apple is already planning on adding USB C to the next iPhone, if the rumors are true. So it sounds like even they agree that cord compatibility is at least possible for them to do with a reasonable effort.
So they help prevent e waste by preventing people from throwing away cords instead of helping people not to have to throw away phones.
Government at its best.
Next they are going to mandate pop up warnings every time I turn on my phone like the cookie banners.
I doubt people are complaining more about cord compatibility than having to replace an entire functioning phone because it no longer receives even security updates. Let alone operating system updates.
You forget that everything now being USB or Lightning is in part due to the EU attempting to harmonize the market on USB before today. All the larger market leaders signed an agreement to move to USB, which Apple understood as "USB at the charger" apparently.
But the EU pushing this for the past decades is responsible for almost everything being interoperable.
That would be believable except Apple has been fighting the EU for years now over not implementing USB at all. Sure the charger has USB, but the phones they've release the last decade don't have a USB port themselves. Even when the industry leaders signed their agreements, Apple had to be the butt. I don't see how them shipping USB chargers with proprietary adapters at some point helps their case here. Apple didn't standardize anything at all here.
It's not a new thing. Car design has been dictated by regulations for decades and while I'm sure it has definitely stopped some novel designs from getting out there, I think we can be mostly thankful that we don't live in a sea of heterogeneous (let alone hazardous) designs. Cars can still look cool, but not to the point of being a detriment.
USB-C is a pretty lax standard (for good and bad) and at the end of the day, the ultimate reason regulators have to come into play is that the industry didn't deal with this issue internally.
Being that my modern car drives nearly 10 thousand miles before each oil change, gets at least 4x the gas mileage, easily drives over 200k miles before major maintenance, and won't turn me into hamburger if I get in a crash, I will argue its well worth it.
You need to distinguish design trends from what the regulation enforced.
The most obvious examples that come to mind:
- Small cars aren't that small anymore to stop them from being blatant death traps.
- A lot of the edges have been smoothed and curved to make impact with pedestrians less deadly (also killed pop-up lights and hood ornaments, which is kinda funny considering the Mercedes Benz hood ornament was sometimes jokingly described as a sight to aim for pedestrians)
- Thick A pillars due to crash tests regulations
While I can blame these for killing out novel or even trademark features of some vehicles lineups, I don't think alone they made everyone homogenize their design, it's just what the industry eventually converged on by themselves.
Look at phones, there's no regulation on what a phone should look like, yet today phones are just a fancy screen, nothing like the incredible variety that Nokia alone sported back in the late 90s/early 2000s.
Cars within a particular period mostly have the same overall design just like today. There will always be exceptions of course, however take a look at some models from 1966 (Ad heavy site, sorry)
> compare cars from 40s-70s to what came after, its a different world
Yeah. we understood that they not only pollute the environment and it's stupid to build cars the size of a starship, but also by 1973 the World (except the US) understood that oil is not for granted and fuel efficiency should be a thing.
Also safety while we are at it, doesn't sound so bad...
A 1964 Ford Galaxie 500 had a wheelbase of 119" and was 210" long.
A 2021 Mustang Mach E has a wheelbase of 107" and is 188.5" long.
Which one is humongous?
Even if you looked at the original 1964 Mustang, its not that much smaller than the Mach E which is a 5-door crossover. The '64 had a wheelbase of 108" and an overall length of 181.6", just 7 inches shorter for a coupe.
Older American cars were often land yachts. The old family sedan of the 1960s are often larger than crossovers of today, they just don't sit as high.
who cares what your car looks like. owning one is a hassle and a money sink and i resent that i've lived in 5 cities who have de-prioritized mass transit.
cars look boring is like saying it's a bummer cancer isn't cool.
"I have no expectation, for example, that these same regulators will stay on top of this and revise it when USB-C stops being the preferred or best choice."
Why?
Everything is usb or lightning because people complained, and everyone but apple listened to people.
If USB-C is no longer the best thing, rather than complain to 10 companies, and hope they all agree, they will complain to regulators, and hope they agree.
What precisely is the difference you see?
The regulators are at least accountable in some sense to the people, the companies are not.
People will always complain about a change, but Lightning was materially better than the Dock Connector in a whole bunch of ways so I think folks got won over pretty quickly.
It's faster, it handles power better, it's more durable, and it's symmetrical. Hell, that last one alone probably won over a bunch of folks.
They aren't designing anything, they mandate an overall requirement - "You must all use the same charge port".
This is no different than any other customer - they are just representing the overall customers who would otherwise not have enough power or voice to achieve what they want.
Also - if you don't want your industry regulated, maybe don't make a mess of it?
Regulators rarely pay attention to things that are working super-well.
No, actually, you wouldn't. As has been explained many times in this thread, that isn't how this kind of regulation works. I do understand that doesn't fit your narrative though.
Rather than making lots of unfounded assertions about what "will" happen, as you keep doing, I would encourage you to actually read the details first.
You release the product with both ports. And then you tell the EU that you'd like your port to be approved as valid alternative. You'll probably have to explain why your connector is better as well as show that consumers won't suffer the cable problem due to the new port (ie, people won't have to buy adapters or chargers just for your device). Then the EU is probably happy to add your port to the directive (which as the directive explains, is a very lightweight process, it doesn't require relegislating anything), possibly even give other vendors a timeline to switch to it if USB-C is to be deprecated. Of course, you're likely going to have to license patents are low prices or risk the EU getting angry over exploitation of the market. Possibly even hand out patents for free and only charge a minor fee for the connector trademarks (like current USB).
Wow that’s a lot better solution. How long would that have taken Apple to change to lightning instead of using the 30 pin connector? What would they have used for the original iPod if they had to wait on the government to approve a connector?
If this same type of law had been in effect with computers back in the 90s Apple would have had to include PS/2 and ISA and add more ports.
That's the point though, there is no more 30 pin connector. And if there is a change, the government ensures consumers won't be wasting money because their old 30-pin chargers are now paperweights or their old phone has no more chargers available.
Also I don't see how this connects to PS2 or ISA, since back then such regulation wasn't in huge demand yet. The charger issue however is a demand and it seems to be backed by the general population. Having one charger for all devices is a big plus for everyone involved.
And if you somehow develop a new charger port that is much much better, then yes, it should have to go through the process of being approved, so that we don't start hopping into new charging ports every 10 years. That would make the entire regulation worthless. And yes that might mean your port has to be interoperable or you need to have both ports (USB AB is an example, which fit both A and B plugs, for micro and mini variants) or easily allow an adapter you can leave plugged into the phone (in-plug adapter).
We're much further into the development into computers and the future of USB-C is less uncertain as PS/2 and ISA. USB-C is a good-enough compromise that can most likely handle the next 30 years of computer needs. The market isn't as quickly evolving in that direction anymore, IMO.
The 30 pin adapter was better than all of the alternatives at the time. It took Apple 8 months to go from idea to shipping product. How much longer would it have taken if they had to wait for the government?
You really think consumers care more about replacing ten dollar cords for their phones than having to replace their phones because Android manufactures don’t provide support for their phones more than a year?
30 years ago, my computer had SCSI (which was a cross platform standard), ADB, and Nubus ports - all better than the industry standard. That would have never happened with government mandating standards. I used my own free will and voted with my dollars to choose to be incompatible- just like Apple users today.
Well, no you don't have to vote with your dollars, you can vote for free. Which I think is the better solution, especially for people who have no choice for voting with their dollars, ie poor people.
And the phone comes with one. They also might have to rebuy their apps. Should all phones now be forced to run the same apps?
Even decade+ old cars support the old iPod protocol for music (still supported by iPhones). Should the government force all phones to support the iPod protocol for the sake of “the poor people so they don’t have to buy new cars”?
It would also be inconvenient for former iPhone users who have AirPrint printers. Should we force all phone makers to support AirPrint? It’s based on an open source protocol.
Is there currently an issue with phones not working with cars?
There is an issue with a huge amount of waste and spent money relating to chargers, especially disadvantaging poor people. If everyone is on USB-C that stops being a problem. All chargers work with your device and all devices work with your charger. I fail to see how escalating the problem into extremes addresses the advantages of the EU decision...
I don't see how that's worse. If you make such a good connector that it should replace all currently used charger ports, there should be a requirement to allow users to give them the time to switch. To not cause untold costs to poor people who can't afford to switch. Interim solutions provide value to society. And laptops aren't bigger phones.
The device is going to come with at least one cord.
How many people can afford at minimum a $429 phone who can’t afford a couple of extra cables?
“poor people aren’t buying iPhones”. But they are buying Androids that are not being supported by their manufactures with even security updates shortly after they buy them.
Cheap Androids not being supported by manufacturers is a separated issue, I fail to see how that applies here. Atleast the cheap phones have a unified charger so poor people don't have to keep buying chargers for them.
Why do people suddenly need to buy a phone for 300$? Almost all current phones support USB C and within 10 years it's will be all of them. No need to buy a phone for a charger.
And if USB-C turns out to be bad, which I don't think'll happen for quite some time, the EU can make sure that legislation ensures poor people won't have to buy a new phone or a new charger until they want to.
Too many get caught up in the "USB-C" connector, and forget about the modes and power delivery. That said, AFAICT the May 2022 revision states (pg 6):
"the devices should incorporate the USB Power Delivery (USB PD) standard (as described in the European standard EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021) and ensure that any additional charging protocols allow for full USB PD functionality (new annex Ia, part I)."
Then the referenced: "EN IEC 62680-1-2:2021" standard specifies
"To facilitate optimum charging, the specification defines two mechanisms a USB Charger can advertise for the Device to use:
1. A list of fixed voltages each with a maximum current.
2. A list of programmable voltage ranges each with a maximum current (PPS). The Device requests a voltage (in 20 mV increments) that is within the advertised range and a maximum current."
But those regs get over my head quickly, so someone else may have better luck interpreting them.
This brings up an issue that Carl Malamud at public.resource.org has been fighting. The EU directive references a standard that costs $300 if you want a copy. You shouldn't have to pay to know your laws.
If the EU is going to reference a standard owned by somebody else, they should purchase a license that allows them to publicly post the entire standard (AFAIK, they haven't done that). Or they could pass laws that say any standards referenced by law lose their copyright status. This would be a type of eminent domain for intellectual property.
Sure, but better now than in 5 or 10 years when there's more lightning cables out in the wild. Otherwise should we still be using lightning in 100 years?
I'm not sure they are clear what they are solving. The statement says:
"European consumers were frustrated long with multiple chargers piling up with every new device"
This was solved by companies no longer providing chargers with new devices. When you buy a new phone, you use your existing charger, only buying a new one when you actually need it.
If you buy a new iPhone, you get a cable that plugs into a USB-C charger.
If USB-C is mandated on the phone end:
* I'll spend the next 20 years realising I have the wrong white phone charging cable with me
* I still won't trust random USB-C cables
* I still won't trust random USB-C chargers
But - let's just do it. Maybe in 40 years it'll have seemed worth it.
> I'll spend the next 20 years realising I have the wrong white phone charging cable with me
> I still won't trust random USB-C cables
> I still won't trust random USB-C chargers
My answer to all three of these is the same: Why? My phone charges with every crappy USB cable and charger. Heck, my laptop will trickle charge [!] off a crappy cable on a crappy airline USB-C port.
There's one place where I'm very careful about USB-C: keeping the specific USB-C cables with my laptop with the chargers themselves, just in case I need the Thunderbolt capability. The TB monitor I bought has a specific cable that stays attached to it.
From looking on AliExpress the last few weeks, TB 100W cables appear to be getting commoditized. It's likely this worry I have about keeping laptop C cables straight won't be a big issue for much longer.
[!] Amusingly, my laptop won't actually charge off the _standard_ A/C plugs on most airplanes because the 100W charger blows a soft fuse that requires unplugging and replugging the A/C adapter!
> [!] Amusingly, my laptop won't actually charge off the _standard_ A/C plugs on most airplanes because the 100W charger blows a soft fuse that requires unplugging and replugging the A/C adapter!
To be fair, 100 W may not seem like a lot when you're used to plugging in to the national power grid, but it's a lot to ask for a non-essential system supplied by an off-grid generator shared by hundreds of passengers. And 100 W is the maximum allowance for In-Seat Power Support Systems according to the FAA, before any conversion losses in your power adapter; the actual amount available to you may be much less.
Oh yeah, that's totally fair. With a standard USB-C DC plug, however, the charger could negotiate a lower current and even provide power fairness across all seats to support the entire plane's load.
My point was really that even the most entrenched "standards" are all just leaky abstractions.
I’ll have the wrong cable with me because I’m just bad at having the right stuff with me anyway. Adding to my confusion is fine though. I’ll just buy particular colours or cable or put tags of them or something.
I don’t trust random cables to plug into my phone because I’m paranoid about getting hacked. I access some systems with sensitive data via my phone and I don’t want to be the route of compromise.
I don’t trust random chargers not to set my house on fire while I sleep, or - worse - fail to charge properly and I don’t have enough charge left to run the crossword app on my phone.
They already do, in many ways. Specifically, they already mandate the type of power plug that electrical appliances must be sold with.
I don't know where I stand on this ruling philosophically, but I'm looking forward to having accessories all use USB-C instead of having some for Apple and some for everyone else.
What does work together mean in this case, it’s not like we’re talking Ethernet where these devices are communicating to each other. Like I can’t use an android charger? Lightning to usb-c cables are pretty much standard. It seems like in the short term anyways this increases e-waste as all my old Lightning chargers become deprecated.
The other day a coworker's iphone battery was nearly empty. He did not have his charger with me. I offered that he could use mine, an usbc charger that has worked for my past 3 phones and also works with my laptop.
He couldn't use it.
Of course, not being an iphone user, I did not have an adapter. Neither did he, considering he forgot his charger.
The iphone and the usbc charger did not work together.
This story would make more sense if you mentioned that he did not have a lightning cable with him. My iPhone X is currently plugged into a USB-C charger, no problem, but it's using a USB-C -> Lightning cable.
I can just plug a usb-c dock and use my android phone with a keyboard and mouse if I wanted to. I could plug two android phones together with usb-c and transfer files from one to another.
Apple's phones are quite locked down, and I think a big reason why is that proprietary lightning connector. When you have a usb port for charging, there is no excuse for not implementing the full standard software-side.
Are they also going to insist that Android manufactures support their phones for more than six months with operating system updates? Worrying about cables causing e-waste is instead of phones, is even more evidence of the technical ineptness of legislators.
I don’t speak German. But the best summary I found doesn’t say that manufacturers have to support cell phones for 7 years with operating system or security updates like Apple has been doing.
I changed the link, it displayed in English for me. The relevant quote is: “objective requirements […] are met only if the consumer is […] provided with updates for the usual period of the product's use and service life. The update obligation may regularly exceed the applicable warranty period.”
The courts will have to decide what “the usual period of the product's use and service life” means exactly, but certainly longer than the six months you originally mentioned.
That's a bit over the top, don't you think? When Apple created the Lightning connector, the accepted alternative was micro-USB. And micro-USB is terrible, awful, no-good, crap. Many millions of people are happy Lightning existed to bridge the time before the rest of the world could design a slightly better small USB connector. Which, of course, might still not be as durable as Lightning, but it's good enough.
Like I said, regulators stepping in is an overstep for the reason you're stating. It's a free market, they built a better mouse trap.
But at this point, USBC is the better mousetrap, they're now just using their market dominance to force a worse mouse trap on everyone to keep milking lucrative patent fees outside of what an efficient market would allow.
So again, fuck em.
Side note, this is why I really hate IP law (or at least the over the top term lengths of it). If they didn't have a monopoly on lightening connectors this wouldn't be a problem and the market would resolve this "problem" on it's own.
You don't get to act like they're just behaving like a free market participant should when they're actively exploiting a different market regulation.
I wonder what the fix here is. Would it be choosing a patent term length that optimises for spurring innovation?
Too short and you make it not worth while. Too long and things stagnate like this. Why does society put up with such suboptimal market parameters?
USB-C is, in fact, NOT at all the "better mousetrap" in terms of an iPhone connector. It has no significant advantages for Apple users who already are using Lightning.
You seem to be leaving out all the ways in which it's better for Apple's customers to have, and to keep, Lightning, so, let's review so you can argue in good faith and from an informed perspective next time:
1) Lightning is significantly more compact than the USB-C port, enabling a more durable case in the vulnerable area surrounding the port
2) Lightning is more durable as well
3) Lightning even FEELS better to plug in and to use
4) Lightning has superior ability to be waterproofed
5) Billions of Lightning cables and accessories have already been manufactured and are in use and it'd be nice to not replace them all until that's actually necessary
Apple could have at least attempted to standardize his port, but they did not because they charged money when a third pary uses their proprietary ports. So stop crying for poor Apple, they have paid PR people to defend them with better arguments anyway.
How often does the world willingly standardize on something invented by a single company? Even if they had released it into public domain, USB-C was going to happen anyway.
The chance is larger the Zero, we can't even think of standardizing something if is proprietary and we have to pay some corporation outside our jurisdiction a lot of money. So Apple did not even try, as usual they tried to milk things as long as possible exactly how they done it with dating apps in some EU countries.
All the time. For example, Garmin created the ANT+ protocol for wirelessly communicating sensor data, such as with bicycle electronics. ANT+ is the standard because Garmin actively promoted it as an open standard and encouraged competitors to adopt it.
Are you telling me there has been other "USB" cables before? No, USB-C came down from the heavens in the dawn of time and evil Apple has been using their evil proprietary lighting all this time, just out of spite to anger Android fanboys.
I said monopolistic not monopoly. To say apple is a monopoly would be incorrect. To describe their behavior with service, repair, the app store, and lightening cable fees as anything other than monopolistic would be intellectually dishonest.
The debate over Lightning, of course, has nothing to do with repairability. As an aside, you might want to take a few minutes to look up what "monopolistic" means.
> Now, pretty much everything is either USB or Lightning. This is good! What problem is the EU solving here?
It makes charging more user friendly.
e.g. just an hour ago my wife asked if she can charge her iPhone with the charger that I use for my laptop and Pixel 4. I had to say "no" - and that's the case even when Apple has USB-C in their laptops, why the odd iPhone (and airpods)?
It is quite pleasing to be able to charge laptop and mobile (and wireless headphones or ebooks) with the same charger.
This isn't about solving an existing problem. As you pointed out, pretty much everyone standardized around micro-usb almost a decade ago. That's mostly because Apple launched the iPhone with a proprietary but standard connector (the original iPod connector). So while all other phone makers had a special adapter and cable for every model, you could plug an iPhone on anything that worked with an iPod. Even the original firewire cable from 2003 would work with it.
What this is about is getting reelected and justifying to voters the usefulness of paying huge amounts of taxes to fund an EU-wide parliament. So they manufactured an (easy) problem to "fix". And it's going to be extremely popular since they'll be attacking and regulating "evil foreign tech giants".
The EU threatening manufacturers with regulation unless they settled on a format led to the end of different chargers for every phone model. It definitely had a direct impact on my life. Getting rid of different cables as well will make me very happy.
"The EU" is not a singular entity. The tiny little parts of the EU doing most of the work on this combined with the tiny amount of time spent by larger parts of the EU seems well worth it to me.
The EU = the EU Commission. Aren't there much bigger issues impacting consumers such as right to repair, planned obsolescence, clean energy etc.? The law will not take effect until 2024, and in the meantime the industry has largely moved toward USB-C / wireless charging.
The EU Commission is still not a singular entity. The commissioners are not the ones doing the underlying work on these things, and so many things happens in parallel.
This was part of the EU Commission's 2020 work programme as one small sub-point among well over a hundred under one of the 43 main goals, as a secondary priority after a long list of climate and economic changes.
You're of course free to disagree with their prioritisation, but this has hardly been a major part of the Commissions work.
> The law will not take effect until 2024, and in the meantime the industry has largely moved toward USB-C / wireless charging.
Even with respect to mobile phones this excludes a certain notable holdout that accounts for a large proportion of the market, and which have kept resisting the EU push for over a decade, and a number of smaller holdouts still sticking with micro-USB.
But you'll note this extends way past phones, including to laptops where there's still a mess of different chargers.
With respect to wireless charging, it makes little difference as long as long as most people still have cables as backup (indeed I've yet to see someone use wireless charging; I'm sure a few more uses it at home, but I for one have zero devices capable of wireless charging; it will not reduce waste anytime soon)
I know for my own use, unnecessary cables and chargers still account for a large proportion of my electric waste because of the frequency of replacement, so for my part I welcome this.
Eh, Apple was moving devices over to USB-C already, they didn't need to be forced. The reason they've held out on the iPhone is because users will complain about new cables ;-). Either way they're going to get criticized.
Apple gets credit for creating Lightning to begin with while we waited for something better than micro-USB to come along. I'm glad for USB-C, but damn, it sure took a while.
Let's be honest here, the only reason why they "held out" is the MFi program and the sweet sweet money they receive for it. I'm happy to see EU put a stop to this practice.
Unless you have numbers to back it up, their MFi revenue is peanuts compared to the metric shitload of money they make directly from their customers blowing a grand or more on a phone. I guarantee they prioritize customer satisfaction way, way above MFi revenue.
Plus Apple Watches have always been only charged via conductive, so it’s likely phones could have gone that way too within a short space of time if the lack of a data cable was deemed acceptable.
Even devices that charge with a cable do not need USB-C if they are too small to physically fit a USB-C port. Though at that point they wont fit a Lightning port either but instead some weird exposed charging pins or wireless charging.
I routinely charge my iPhone on a wireless charger. When I'm in a hurry, I plug it in. I don't want that option taken away, wireless is nowhere near fast enough yet.
I’ve also found wireless charging to be inconsistent at best, especially with a case. Half the time I come back and I didn’t place my phone in exactly the right place. Maybe it’s the quality of my chargers, but until I can buy a random charger on Amazon and assume it to be as reliable as an equivalent cable, I don’t think we can give up the cables.(fwiw my current charger is name brand)
This is why the last couple of generations of iPhones have supported "magsafe" charging, so the magnets line things up every time. Amazon has plenty of "magsafe" chargers for iPhones.
To be clear, wireless charging with "magsafe" is still slower than using a cable.
They will "periodically" check if there are better standards. The USB-C will only be fully introduced by 2027. I think it's probable that at least as soon as they're fully introduced we need a new standard.
It's bleak either way. If we don't regulate enough, companies will eat us alive, and if we overregulate, then the government will do the same. We're better off with some kind of balance between these two, and mandating the charging port like this worked out well so far in my opinion, and so, I welcome the upgrade too.
Are standardised wall sockets planned economy?
Charging ports for cars?
This has been a push for more than a decade now and the reason everyone aside from apple converges because of the brussels effect.
From my perspective it has been great.
The alternative isn't just plain competitive designs. It's also anticompetitive practices.
The problem with USB-C is that you can't just pick up a device cable and power brick and expect them to work together. As an example, my Apple 96W USB-C charger doesn't charge my nintendo switch. The cable that came with my phone doesn't charge said fully Mac when used with the 96w charger. There is no indication of incompatibility between these devices until you realise they don't work. This is going back to the dc jack era where you end up with these [0] guys with various tips and dials that all meet the USB-C "standard" for a connector but don't work.
The issue with the Nintendo Switch is that Nintendo designed their own faulty USB-C charging implementation rather than merely using the reference design. It's not a failure of the spec, it's a failure to adhere to the spec.
And how am I supposed to know that when looking at a device that has a USB-C port for charging, and the instructions on the charger [0] say "Nintendo Switch can be charged by plugging the AC adapter into the console's USB Type-C connector."
> New Annex (Part I): It requires that mobiles phones and the similar radio devices, if they are capable to be recharged via wired charging, are equipped with the USB Type-C receptacle and, if they also require charging at voltages higher than 5 volts or currents higher than 3 amperes or powers higher than 15 watts , incorporate the USB Power Delivery charging communication protocol.
Nintendo will have to get its crap together and properly support Power Delivery, the burden is not on you.
Nintendo always does something that's JUST slightly off with their consoles that make them annoying as hell to use.
With the switch it's the screwed up USB-C implementation and the fact that you can't use bluetooth headphones (it has BT support, but only for the controllers)
With the DS, the wifi only supported WEP, not WPA, even though WPA2 had been released by the time the DS came out
The Switch was updated to support BT headphones, with the caveat that you can only have 2 BT controllers simultaneously connected with the headphones, and the controllers can’t be switched while headphones are in.
The reason for the limitation is bandwidth and latency.
Multiple devices on one Bluetooth controller have to timeslice in 4 millisecond (iirc) chunks. Audio devices in a high quality mode consume a substantial amount of the overall bandwidth. It also doesn't matter if your packet consumes the full size of a chunk of not, all of them are equally sized. You'd have to do two audio chunks and one controller chunk * 2 controllers to maintain a 60 Hz sample rate on the controllers.
By trying, returning the device (ouch for the shop), and then complaining to your local enforcer of Radio Equipment Directive (ouch for the manufacturer).
The only comment I could see in the article on that topic is this:
> the EU simply said that "consumers will be provided with clear information on the charging characteristics of new devices, making it easier for them to see whether their existing chargers are compatible.
Which is super disappointing, as the person who wrote TFA clearly didn't read anything other than the press release. The actual supporting documentation is here [0] and says:
> on the packaging or a label, manufacturers would have to
provide information on specifications relating to charging capabilities, in line with annex Ia (amended Article 10(8) RED). This includes a description of the wired chargers' power requirements (the text displayed should read: 'The minimum power delivered by charger shall be equal or higher than [xx] watts') and specifications on charging capabilities ('USB PD fast charging' and an indication of any other supported charging protocols).
Which is still not great - this doesn't cover cables for example, and it doesn't guarantee that it will be printed on the device. Here [1] are apples chargers in the UK - unless they're side by side it's impossible to tell which one of those chargers is which, and even at that unless you know for sure one of the devices is X, its' really quite difficult to tell.
It's worse than that, just because a charger can support 60W doesn't mean it supports every standard combination of volts and amps below that level and just because a device can charge at 60W doesn't mean it uses the same combination of volts and amps your charger supports. I have a 100W charger than can't "fast charge" my phone (USB-C on both ends) because they only overlap capabilities on lower wattages.
It looks like Nintendo would have to fix that in order to comply with the regulations. The bare minimum, if I read it correctly, is to label the port and charger making it clear what their limitations are.
I have a launch-model Switch, and it still has trouble charging even on latest firmware. It's very possible that this is one of the "Mariko" fixes; Nintendo silently released a refresh of the Nintendo Switch before the OLED model was announced, dubbed the Mariko models. These had a number of changes, including but not limited to:
- New, more secure boot sequence
- Updated Nvidia Tegra board
- ~20% better battery life
- Reinforced chassis design
It seems likely that they took the opportunity with Mariko to redesign their charging ICs to be more tolerant. I heartily recommend looking up some of the more subtle differences between the models too, it's really interesting to see how Nintendo updated a mass-market product without anyone really noticing.
Just to make this thread a bit more aggravating, I have two pre-Mariko switches — at least they both have the Nvidia Tegra vulnerability, anyway — and I have yet to see either fail to charge on random USB-C cables and chargers.
As another poster mentioned, however, they will only dock with the OEM charger.
Seems like whatever is happening with the OG switch USB-C implementation it’s not straightforward.
When docking, the Switch specifically wants 15V/2.6A [1]. Any less and it won't dock. There are some third-party vendors which have somehow circumvented this requirement, though [2].
Creating a spec that people don’t want, can’t, or can’t afford to adhere is a failure.
I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence.
The problem is that USB C is a massive spec with a lot of things that aren’t always needed in it (display, pd, high data speeds etc). You can either design your product to implement a lot more things (eg Macs) or skimp out and cause confusion (Switch). By breaking the standard, people effectively have to buy your charger or cables to know it’ll work. If I have to either buy a high end product or buy cables and chargers only from the original brand, we aren’t really any better off with this.
>I don’t recall ever seeing prior USB devices fail at adherence.
Really? You've never seen a power only micro-usb cable (missing 2 bus lines)? I have dozens from all types of devices that use USB as a charging only connector.
This has been a problem with every USB iteration (hard to have the U in USB if you aren't able to handle a wide variety of applications), but I vastly prefer it to the early 00s when you might have 5 different cables to each "specialty" application.
Or maybe Nintendo just decided that they didn't care. I really don't see how any technical specification could be expected to physically prevent everyone in the world from deliberately implementing it partially or incorrectly. I don't doubt that USB-C might be technically complicated and confusing compared to alternatives and predecessors, but I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo engineering gave it their best shot and simply couldn't manage to do it correctly.
> I find it very difficult to believe that Nintendo engineering gave it their best shot and simply couldn't manage to do it correctly.
I'm sure that's not it. I'm sure it was
"Hey product manager. We can launch in 6 weeks if this port accepts power and connects to a dock, or 36 weeks if we need to conform to standards in section 17, subsection 5 part 41.2B of standard 1120 on European code B7"
"what does <standards> get us"
"Nothing, we don't need those features. Also it'll add $25 to the bill of materials"
"ignore it then, we want to launch sooner and increase our margin."
Perhaps so, but how is that something you can blame the spec for? Any remotely non-trivial spec will be easier to implement partially than to implement completely.
Maybe the spec should be more “trivial”. I like USB C over something like micro usb but micro usb is easy enough to use as a power source in my high school electronics class but i don’t think usb c would be.
Maybe apple had it right originally to have “thunderbolt” as a super powerful all-in-one cable (except add power) and we needed a simple “reversible micro usb” for everything else.
Sure we are, if they don't conform to the spec then they can't get a CE mark; which then means it can't be sold in the EU and the device misses out on a 350~400M person market.
It may not be fully compliant to the spec but it does always charge in my experience. It will charge eventually from most any usb-c charger, including Apple's. But, a docked switch requires 15V and not all chargers will provide it, or maybe they just don't provide it to the off-spec switch. Similar story with the HDMI output of the dock. It took a bit of research to buy a charger and HDMI adapter that work with both my switch and macbook, but it was possible and it's nice for travel.
It's even funnier that. Even your charger have 15v. The dock something failed the handshake and require you to unplug and plug again to trigger the 15v. I think the switch is just not spec compliant. That shouldn't happen on a device that implement the spec properly.
It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up. I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it.
Compare that with USB-A where even cheap Chinese cables from the lowest bidder usually work (work well enough at least - you might get voltage drop but it will still charge if you leave it on long enough) because the spec is so simple that even the worst manufacturers manage to do a good enough job, and it's something you can trivially DIY if you need to.
Now compare that with USB-C. So many moving parts that can go wrong and so much corners that can be cut by unscrupulous manufacturers. Not to mention that even the most expensive devices (Apple) don't give you any visibility on what type of cable/charger/etc you have even though that information is technically available to the device (that's how it negotiates power delivery) which is extremely confusing even to tech-savvy people.
>It's still not a great spec if it's so complex that you can screw it up.
People and companies can screw thing up royally regardless of spec complexity when there's no review/oversight involved. That's not a valid argument.
If you want to force and check adherence to a spec you need to involve certification authorities (TÜV, SGS, UL, etc.) but then widget prices would increase dramatically.
Edit: to address the child comments below: who gets to be the judge of the complexity of the spec? If Nintendo fucked it up but some EE students can get it right through side projects on github, does that make the spec complex or does that make Nintendo incompetent (lacks a HW review/qualification process)?
The spec could be as simple as "white wire goes to positive terminal, black wire goes to negative terminal" and there's still the chance of an implementation fuckup in the design pipeline, especially in large projects/companies with distributed siloed teams like Nintendo due to poor internal communication, if there is no proper internal review/qualification process in the design loop.
Edit 2: I looked at the USB-C charging specs and they're easy enough to understand for any graduate EE and for any company who's had some basic experience with USB as a whole, let alone 100 year old multi-billion HW conglomerates like Nintendo.
IMHO, Nintendo's USB-C charging fuckup is 100% on them. I wish people would stop needlessly defending them here.
Edit 3: Also, what if Nintendo intentionally chose not to follow the spec in order to force the users to use and buy only original parts from them? Either way, incompetence or malice, you really can't blame the spec here.
Just pick a couple of those USB-C docks on the market and check how many are actually working for you. I used over 10 different USB-C docks from different vendors. It doesn't matter which vendor, they all have various issues. They might be perfectly fine for some machines but lots lots of troubles for some other machines which are also perfectly fine with some of the other docks. I have never seen something worse than that.
>Just pick a couple of those USB-C docks on the market and check how many are actually working for you.
1) How is it the spec's fault that random OEMs go to extreme cost cutting measures in order to price dump themselves to the bottom by not following the spec? Of course they won't work properly.
But again, for the 100th time, that's not the specs fault that manufacturers actively choose to ignore it.
If a driver chooses to knowingly run a red light, is it automatically the fault of the spec (the highway code) ?
2) You're moving the goalposts. We are talking about USB-C charging spec here that's super easy to follow, and Nintendo didn't, not USB-C docs with display-port and other fluff. So this dock example doesn't apply to Nintendos' refusal to follow the charging spec.
Well, if a spec has no validation procedure, compatibility enforcement or certification, what’s even the point? If the switch isn’t actually working as intended they shouldn’t be allowed to call it usb-c. There should be some minimum mandatory requirements. I haven’t studied these spec, but if there exists a min spec to qualify to call yourself USB and the switch case isn’t covered, OR, there’s no minimum spec, it IS the spec’s fault.
>Well, if a spec has no validation procedure, compatibility enforcement or certification, what’s even the point?
What is the point of anything then? Most pieces of tech we take for granted are an unregulated bundle of specs that more or less work together with one another most of the time well enough to be valued at several trillions and be in every household.
If you want to regulate and certify every USB-C cable in your household then increase prices would stop the adoption of any such tech and you would then complain about the costs and over-regulation.
The EU is already regulating USB-C into place. How much more regulation do you want?
Let's not let 'perfect' be the enemy of 'good'. Remember 20 years ago when every phone and electronic widget in your house came with its own proprietary cable and proprietary interface and included CD with proprietary Windows-only software to work? Yeah! Lost the original cable/dock with the proprietary 20-pin connector? Good luck with that mate.
Yes, USB-C still has teething problems due to manufacturers cutting costs and fighting tooth and nail against standardization so they can keep their walled garden rent seeking models of the past (remember Sony shoving their proprietary Memory-Stick everywhere despite SD cards having won?), but despite these issues, we've never had it so good in terms of cross-compatibility as we have it today and this push for USB-C everything is a step in the right direction.
The USB consortium seemingly refuses to do anything that would hamper adoption, even if it's bad for consumers. They could make a list of icons that products can put on if they support. So a cable that supports 15W charging would indicate it with a little icon on the product or packaging. Then mandate a testing procedure, where failure to follow it or lying about the results is trademark infringement.
Some vendors now let the USB-IF compliance test most products (Amazon Basics, Apple), but no consumer cares. Even amongst the ones which do certify their product, no one uses the logo.
Looks this isn’t that complicated, what people want is the ability to know that I all conforming USB-C cables are identical and can be interchanged freely. I don’t give two shits about the devices at the ends not being able to negotiate or different power bricks charging faster or slower.
Power and ground wires alone don't cut it sadly when you're dealing with much higher wattages. There needs to be a level of negotiation between the host and the charger to decide on a specific power (current & voltage) that both can support.
In USB-A this was accomplished through a hodge-podge of different resistances applied across data lines, not officially part of the standard but just done by manufacturers. USB-C is a huge improvement on this.
I do agree however that the cable-labelling situation is awful. Maybe some kinda tier system could help. Every charger, cable and device could have a class. The charging rate is the lowest of the three. E.g. a "Class 5 cable will charge up to 200 watts and has a pink end". If you pair that with a Class 2 charger (say, 50 watts) and a class 3 laptop (100 watts) you'll be limited to charging your laptop at 50 watts.
USB-C is infamous for being complex like that, but I think the charging part is basically fine? People talk about the Nintendo Switch often, but I have never heard any _other_ example of something where the charging didn't work, so I think maybe it's a rare exception.
(This is distinct from the "fast charging" mode(s?), which does seem to have compatibility problems. But in that case, the failure mode is that device charges slowly, which is probably not a big issue for the kind of small phones/gadgets that the EU regulation targets. The previous standard was micro-USB, which can't do fast-charging anyway.)
> I understand the complexity for data, but for power I wish it was as simple as power & ground wires and that's it.
The minimum requirements are that you have to support the USB 2.0 protocol:
> While BC1.2 is still supported over USB Type-C because it depends on the USB2.0 lane, a significantly simplified and higher power current capability mechanism is also implemented. This simplified approach involves resistor pull-down/ pull-up relationships. These pull-down/pull-up resistors are connected to the CC wire and the upstream facing port (UFP) must monitor the voltage on the CC1 and CC2 pins in order to detect the current sourcing capability of the down- stream facing port (DFP) it is connected to. This is a substantial improvement over the complicated handshake mech- anisms involved with USB BC1.2.
> The basic USB Type-C current capabilities are Default USB (500mA for USB2.0 and 900mA for USB3.0), 1.5A@5V, and 3A@5V.
I wanted to get a trimmer with USB-C. Unfortunately, all that I found would not allow c-to-c charging. Only charging from A. The 'A' basically allows a 'hot wire' type ch
Other people saying "what about innovation!?" That's fine. Let's say the USB consortium releases USB-D with input from Apple, Google, and many other stakeholders. The EU can set another deadline for newly released devices to adhere to the new version instead of the old one. The transition will involve a period of time where older devices are still on C and newer ones on D, which is totally compatible with the regulation and is necessary with or without regulation. It's ludicrous to think companies won't be able to "iterate": you would be crazy to go to market with any cable technology that isn't already very mature. Apple spent years designing lighting chargers because they knew that once they were released they'd be around for a long time (and they have been!)