Cool. The EU does have its [many!] faults. But they have a pretty good track record when it comes to consumer rights and consumer choice. Next up I'd like to see them do the same for the plethora of incompatible cordless power-tool systems out there as they did with insisting all mobile phones standardise on a USB connector.
I was pleased to see recently that a couple of different brands at my local DIY store had interoperable batteries. I bought a small lawnmower which now uses the same battery as a cordless drill from another brand. The brands that joined are listed on their marketing site[0].
Edit: One of the companies has a slightly less obnoxious website which also lists brands[1]
This is why the EU is right we have to regulate these things. There just aren’t right answers here, each battery has pros and cons, so it’s a political matter full stop.
There are a lot of German niche companies in that list. Like seriously "one specific job" niches ;)
Metabo (the one I know for their powertools, though Fischer is famous for their dowels and Edding for their markers) is known for drills as well as gardening power tools. I think this is more a non-consumer area (though Metabo certainly dabbles in consumer devices)
Wow this is a great idea. I do have to say I'm disappointed, but not surprised, that none of the bigger brands in power tools look to be participating.
The only name I recognize there is Bosch, I've never had any of their tools but my perception is that they are a mid-tier brand. It would be great to see players like DeWalt, Milwaukee, and Makita do something like this.
Bosch segments its own market into the "green" and "blue" parts, the latter being for professional use. They're very well-made and costly, on-par and competitive with the other brands you mentioned. But of course they are not in this Power4All alliance thing and are incompatible with the "green" consumer stuff.
wow this is very interesting, and the main reason I hadn't bought many cordless tools, because I didn't want 2-5 years down the road to have a bunch of chargers and batteries that are all incompatible among each other! I'll reconsider it whenever I need new tools, thanks for sharing!
I think that's a bit trickier. If Makita or whoever was forced to change their batteries, anyone with a big catalogue of their tools would be pretty miffed.
Also, I've mentioned this on hn before, there is already the Cordless Alliance, which does exactly this.
Sadly, there's only a couple of useful-in-a-mainstream-sense brands in there: Mafell and Metabo. The rest are very niche.
I would be wary of this "cordless alliance", the dynamics are closer to that of a kingdom than an alliance... it's basically lots of small(er) german tool manufacturers using Metabo batteries instead of developing their own. Which is great, but not really the same thing as an alliance of equals agreeing to align existing systems
That's not really so surprising though. Any brand that already has a system would be penalising existing customers by changing, we're not talking usb cables here.
Good on Metabo for doing it, and good on Mafell for signing up to use them. The smaller brands it's a no-brainer I guess.
Why? It's not like manufacturers haven't switched all their batteries themselves before? If all of them are forced to have the same batteries, that's no different from makita or dewalt or bosch going "we're switching to a new 24V battery system, and your old tools won't take them. deal with it".
I just sold some tools for 5 euro each. They need new batteries but company is gone. Makita can just continue to sell their old batteries while their new tools use a standardized form factor. They could also make an old type battery with replaceable cells.
I have five or six Makita 18v batteries and a load of their tools. If they only make new tools with the new battery they are potentially making me quite miffed. If I want the new tool I need also the new batteries and charger. Also I'd need multiple batteries because you can't really only have one.
Personally I'd be happy for that situation because of the big upside, but I can see why a company would not want it.
Plus, the most logical thing to do is not make a new standard, but pick an existing one. But who gets to be the golden brand whose battery system remains unchanged?
I would love it to happen but I can't see it happening for a while.
As somebody who has a couple of Makita tools and batteries, it would be really bad if they were hypothetically forced to change. Specifically because not being able to get new tools that use my existing 18V batteries would mean buying a whole set of new batteries, and then it’s so annoying keeping two kinds of batteries that when the old ones wear out, I’d probably instead buy new tools for the new ones. So the old tools potentially become e-waste far sooner than they would be (the old batteries wouldn’t be available forever) as well as the waste of resources for the premature replacement of all the tools and batteries…
If the EU standardizes on battery packs, Ryobi needs go get a free pass or extension of some sort. Ryobi have kept the same battery format for 25 years, whereas their competitors have changed battery standards 2 or 3 times during that timeframe.
Ryobi and Milwaukee are owned by the same company, and Ryobi products have not changed because they are the low-end product made by that company. The parent company uses the newer battery formats in their more expensive brands.
Ryobi should not be praised for failure to innovate. They did not do this out of a desire to preserve compatibility, but rather out of cheapness.
They have switched from NiCad to lithium ion. When new cell chemistries became available they made a lithium+ line. They now have higher amperage batteries with more contacts for their "HP" line of tools. Those batteries and tools are still backwards compatible. I can take an HP battery I bought for my impact wrench and throw it into my 20 year old recip saw I bought at a garage sale and it works.
Ryobi products are low end but they have innovated plenty while maintaining compatibility. Given that TTI has access to the pro market via other brands, and Ryobi geared for homeowners, I don't see this as anything but a win for the average Ryobi customer.
I support the charging connector standardization, but not tool batteries. There are so many factors in play I don't see how standardization would offer enough benefit to offset innovation penalties. Even within a given brand/connector, there are variations on capabilities like size and duty cycle and power output. I have a bunch of Milwaukee cordless tools on the M18 platform, and the smaller tools (e.g. drills) can use any battery but some tools (e.g. chainsaw) only work with a subset because of higher power draw.
I have cordless tools across a number of battery platforms and while it's convenient when they can be shared, it's ultimately not a big deal to have a few if another company makes a better tool. Tradespeople won't lock themselves in if the right tool is on a different platform.
"Tradespeople won't lock themselves in if the right tool is on a different platform."
Right, but home users will. I have 5 Ryobi One+ batteries, so there's no way I'll buy a battery-operated tool from a different brand, even if the tool itself is better/cheaper than the equivalent Ryobi product.
Agreed. I've got about half a dozen Makita cordless tools taking the LXT battery. I'm pretty happy with the brand but I do kind of feel like I'm trapped using whatever Makita offers from now on.
The charger cost about £70 and the 3 batteries I have were a similar price, each. So, for me, changing brands for a particular tool would mean an outlay of 'Price of Tool' + 'Price of Charger' + Price of n Batteries' which just isn't worth it, unless the rival company's tool was 2 or 3 times as good as the Makita offering.
I've sometimes thought that maybe Metabo, DeWalt or Milwaukee's version of a certain tool I wanted was slightly better than Makita's one. But, as I say, not twice or three times as good, to justify that kind of outlay.
So, like quite a few people commenting here, I'm kind of stuck with supporting the blue team now --even when they occasionally get outplayed by their opponents.
There's a reason Milwaukee, Makita, DeWalt, AEG, and Bosch, are wildly popular.
They're almost entirely indistinguishable. We also have some Hilti branded cordless tools, also fine.
My personal preference for home use is something like Ryobi One+ or Ozito PXC (less than half the price of the One+) because I'm actually at work all day using power and cordless tools supplied by work, I don't plan on taking my home tools to three or four hundred commercial construction sites or building 1000 houses with them.
Tool brand preference is, in my opinion, largely a sport-like
I don't mind so long as third parties are free to make compatible batteries and tools. Unfortunately there's no reasonable migration path for someone already invested in tools and batteries. Unlike phones that get cycled through in just a few years, I am invested in my tools with the expectation that the majority of my less-used tools will last my lifetime. I'd like to be able to buy replacement compatible batteries for at least that long.
The cordless power tools typically have the battery management system in the device, not in the battery. The battery tends to contain protection circuitry, but no logic that determines charge rate etc.
That means every device manufacturer will claim, even if the law requires that devices must all have the same plug, that a competitors device drew too much current, or charged their battery too fast/too slow/at too a low a temperature, and thats why performance sucks.
In reality, these technical problems could be solved - but device manufacturers will make the small hurdle into a big one when explaining why they can't all standardize.
Many of the packs that I've seen the inside of has balancing circuitry included.
Also worth considering these packs are charged separate from the tool. So this means the tool cannot control the charge rate etc.
Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts. This suspicion is amplified when you consider that some of these brands are made by the same company.
>Lastly, based on my luddite eyes, the difference between makita, milwaukee, bosch, dewalt and ryobi batteries seem to me to only be a different keying in the plastic mating parts
The fact that you can buy adaptors to allow one brand's batteries to be used on another brand's tools would seem to back up your theory. However, with the adaptors costing around £20 each and being produced by no-brand 'warranty voiding' unofficial third parties you've never heard of, it would be an expensive business if you wanted to be brand agnostic in your power tool choices, as you'd need a heap of adaptors to cover all the various combinations of tool & battery. Added to which is the potential for a dodgy 3rd party adaptor to damage tool or battery.
I'd like to see the EU designate a common battery interface for all newly manufactured tools & batteries. That way we could buy the best tool for the job each time, instead of being locked into using whatever the Blue, Yellow, Red or Green team are fielding in that area.
The manufacturers would doubtless also produce their own adaptors to allow their existing tools & batteries to work with this new 'One Interface to Rule Them All'
I much enjoyed my mobile phone with AA batteries. I had a pocket full of charged ones but if they ran out every corner store sold them. (They drained pretty quickly eventho it had a led display but replacing them was as fast as reloading a gun)
+1 that the plastic is the main difference are the "everything to Ryobi"-plastic adadpters you can buy. I use Makita battery->Ryobi tool and it works great.
Ryobi are actually the first batteries that I genuinely dislike; I have 8 year old Black & Decker drill whose battery still works great. Similar experience with some other manufacturers. But we went all-in on Ryobi at Home Depot a few years ago, and we now have to buy 2-4 new batteries a year. Then after 12-18 months, the battery shows as defective on its charger.... brutal.
(probably less-than-average usage patterns as we are lazy house owners; stored inside, not abused)
Of the tools you listed, none are made by the same company. At least for their primary products.
All of the large format packs have pins for each cell, so charging with a standard balance charger is pretty easy. You can find plenty of schematics for homemade controllers online. Where they differ however, are the other pins. Some use a communication protocol like SMBUS. Some have dedicated pins for specific things like overcurrent or temperature. It varies highly from manufacturer to manufacturer.
AFAIK, all tool brands are moving to communication protocols for the packs.
[EDIT] Someone mentioned adapters. I don't believe there are adapters that support newer communicating packs (e.g. the OEM chargers won't work with the adapter). Older packs are all analog, so conversion is just a simple matter of rerouting the pins.
> Next up I'd like to see them do the same for the plethora of incompatible cordless power-tool systems out there as they did with insisting all mobile phones standardise on a USB connector.
We should all be glad that didn't happen with micro-USB or some of the worse connectors years ago, because we would still be stuck with them. USB-C was innovated by the market, not by EU bureaucrats.
> pretty good track record when it comes to consumer rights
Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.? If anything, I'd say the EU puts a mild theatre every now and then, and gives the US giants a free pass otherwise.
>Are you sure EU has "pretty good track record" with these fines of Google, FB, et al.?
I wasn't specifically referring to the Google [and other] anti-trust measures. I was thinking of things along the lines of abolishing roaming charges for mobile phone use, the right to open a bank account in any EU country, the right to work and reside in any EU country, the introduction of the Euro [which I know a lot of people are ambivalent about, but it did get rid of currency conversion charges]. All of which I consider to be 'consumer friendly' actions.
I'm also a European. But unfortunately resident in UK. So all those benefits and more are now lost to me. Still. At least we showed Johnny Foreigner who's boss, eh?
Probably because I work in tech in the US, but that has not been my view.
What was the fine that the EU put on VW for intentionally cheating on emissions standards? And how does that compare with the many fines Google has gotten?
Volkswagen has definitely been fined less than Google - they were fined about a billion. The difference is though that the EU wasn't really prepared for the Volkswagen fraud - there was no standing law setting enormous fines for companies engaged in an emissions fraud of that scale like there is for GDPR violations. Since the scandal they brought in legislation to prevent it in the future, including fines of up to €30,000 per car sold violating the emissions guidelines.
EU regulator powers operate with an honestly fairly limited scope based on the laws passed by parliament and the commission. There's no EPA like organisation with broad powers to persue companies for most forms of misbehaviour like there is in the US - that's left to the member states, with countries like Germany and Italy individually prosecuting Volkswagen executives for fraud.
The difference with GDPR and anti-trust violations is that the EU has been deliberately granted the power to exact severe fines on companies for each individual offence. If post-scandal Volkswagen had been caught falsifying emissions again and again (similiar to Google's repeated GDPR violations) they might have been hit with more and more fines of the severity that Google has.
Couldn't they have prosecuted VW on the basis of "competition"?
Like VW had an unfair advantage over other (non-EU) car companies because they didn't meet the standards.
The reality is that they didn't want to hurt VW that much because it is an important EU company. Same reason the US fined the crap out of them -- but would have been lenient on Ford in the same circumstances.
This is normal stuff. I was just responding to the idea that the EU was "too soft" on US tech companies.
You have a point, though one must not forget who runs the world. Spoiler alert: it's not the EU. The bigger theater is forcing the big US bois to invest here (building data centers) by playing the privacy card.
The standard business practice of many US tech companies is to go:
We have a ton of VC capital. Can we use this to price dump our way into the market or to do slightly illegal or very illegal things covered in great UI/UX/XD so that some consumers are our own side, and by the time they ban us, we're too big too fail and fines we get are lower than our profits?
> Big fines are a start, but a better approach is taxation, since that takes away the regulatory risk for the companies.
Companies should obey the laws first and foremost. I'm not sure there's a lot of regulatory risk either; Google certainly has enough lawyers to know that what they did was illegal.
There is no reason to think Google is not aware of EU laws.
One such law for example forbids fake reviews.
Google creates profiles for small businesses, invites everyone to anonymously say whatever they want about business and rate it.
Then they list advertisement from competitors next to it.
Their solution for the public shaming contest is that you should send more <s>customers</s> people to google to review your business and of course purchase adds.
The law says that if you want to do reviews of any kind you must be able to prove the review is from someone who purchased a product or service. The fines are in % of global revenue. Google could have some legal talking point if they allowed business to disable it.
Huh? The EU tech sector would absolutely love the US giants pulling out (phrasing) of Europe. Who wants to fight all these behemoths that pay almost no taxes here because they "invest" so much
Let's imagine for a second that someone really wanted FB out of Europe. FB would fight tooth and nail to stay - because losing the European market would be a huge blow to them. Practically every European business at least tried using FB ads, some have permanent campaigns. There is no way FB would ever leave Europe. They will fight, they will pay, they will protest, but the chances of them leaving are exactly zero.
I don't think it qualifies as an "opposite", because enforced standards also create consumer choice sometimes.
Case in point: The enforced standardising of mobile phone chargers has given consumers more choice of chargers to use with their phone. Thas proven quite useful in practice, e.g. when they leave the one that came with their device at home because they didn't expect to need it, or when the manufacturer's own brand is more expensive than an alternative, or if they have an old phone.
I remember before USB-C standardised phone power, when visiting someone the chance that they had a power supply you could use was very low, because each one used a different connector. Even different models from the same brand. If you went travelling at short notice, you might have to buy a second charger just to keep you going for a few days. That's no longer required. Over the years you would end up with a box full of incompatible chargers, all e-waste. I think I have about 10.
This particular consumer benefit didn't happen voluntarily among manufacturers (unlike, say, SIM cards), so forcing it has increased consumer choice in some useful respects.
I prefer Apple's lightning connector (even though I don't have an iPhone), and other connectors better than USB-C would surely emerge if allowed to, so I do see benefits in not enforcing a standard like that too strictly. But the situation before USB-C mobile power was less consumer choice not more, for consumers of almost every phone.
That's a bit of a disingenuous comment though. I'd make a distinction between forcing standardisation on something like a power supply connector and forcing standardisation of actual products themselves.
Standardisation of the former means we don't have to have half a dozen sockets on the wall because every domestic appliance manufacturer uses a different design plug... or have each of those sockets provide a different voltage because every appliance manufacturer opted for a different voltage.
Standardisation of the latter leads to waiting 15 years for your Trabant.
The EU insisting on all phones standardizing on the USB connector is evidence of just the opposite and shows the cluelessness and shortsightness of the EU.
You will still have phones that come with “standard USB C” cables where some support different power delivery, data speeds (or not support data transfer at all), very few will support video over USB C (which is standardized), etc.
So still when the Android user with the cheap power only USB C cord moves over to the hypothetical iPhone 15 with USB C, they will still have to throw away their USB C cable that potentially doesn’t support high speed data or video over USB C. Both supported by todays iPads with USB C.
If the same mandate had gone through when it was first proposed, we would have been stuck with micro USB.
Because the mandate is not about phones or data. It's about battery powered devices and charging. I don't need data in the cable for my wireless earbuds, or my battery pack. My toothbrush or my beard trimmer. So that hypothetical USB C cable doesn't have to be thrown away, it can still be used for other devices. Which is why standardization is good.
> What are the chances that it will charge my MacBook Pro 16 inch that does support “standard” USB C?
Most likely yes, unless it's a non-compliant cable in the first place, and possibly at a reduced speed (60W max).
>Will that “standard” USB C cable that comes with my Beats Flex headphones charge my iPhone 12 Pro Max? My Anker battery?
Ignoring that iPhones don't have USB C, yes to both at the fastest charge rate available.
Only times where you have to worry about a cable with USB-C when charging is if charging power exceeds 60W or the cable is optical. Above 60W you need marked cables, some go up to 100W, and some (will, not seen in the wild yet) go up to 240W. There are plans to deprecate the 100W tier as well.
Maybe not, but what's the alternative? Should we give up because of incompatibilities and go back to proprietary cables for everyone? Do we move back to DC jacks that offer no voltage negotiation so you can blow up your 5V battery pack with a 24V input?
You're letting perfect be the enemy of good here.
Also I think the ideal endgame is that your Beats Flex headphones don't come with cables at all because of standardization. Look at Apple (and most phone manufacturers) no longer packaging chargers.
If the aim is to prevent eWaste yes. Someone should be able to buy a “standard” USB access cable and know that it actually work across devices if it is government mandated. If not, what’s the point of the “standard”?
And even the cheapest power only USB cables with the cheapest USB power supply provides "standard" 5V power. If your device doesn't accept that, isn't that a problem with your Macbook and not the cable?
How far do you think a 5W USB C cable will get charging a 16 inch laptop?
The USB standard is fine until the unsuspecting consumer who left the USB C cord to his MacBook Pro 16 goes to a random drug store to pick up a standard “USB C” cable and wonders why their laptop is still going dead after a few hours of heavy use not knowing the cord is incapable of delivering 100W of power.
Or the hypothetical iPhone 16 user goes to the same store because he wants to watch video on his TV and buys a “standard” USB C cable and finds out that the cable doesn’t support video over USB C - which is part of the standard.
Not to mention the unsuspecting tourist who wants to back up the pictures and video from his phone to his computer so he won’t incur roaming charges and finds out the USB C cable he purchased is power only.
Once again, you're letting perfect be the enemy of good. A 5W USB C cable will charge faster than the perfect universal cable standard that doesn't exist.
can it "charge"? yes. The charging circuitry either can query the output voltage of the power supply, or knows what the voltage should be (on insertion, 5VDC) and determines if the wire is too small or too long to support higher wattage. There's a reason that quickcharge et al use 9, 12, 18 volts, same wattage, but compatible with any of old, too long, or too small gauge wires.
You'll notice weirdness with anything that speaks a different language, i think USB defaults to power delivery, which is 5V @ 2.5A - or whatever. If your charger speaks the same protocol as your device, it will get as much power as it can through whatever cable you use.
this doesn't speak to other comments about "high speed USB C" - i have plenty of power delivery cables that do decent wattage but cannot transfer data, it doesn't even beep the computer when you plug something in to it.
>So still when the Android user with the cheap power only USB C cord moves over to the hypothetical iPhone 15 with USB C, they will still have to throw away their USB C cable that potentially doesn’t support high speed data or video over USB C.
Except that it's still a perfectly fine cable for charging, which is what most people do with their cables?
As long as you don’t care about data transfers of the very large video and photos that modern phones can create or connecting to a larger screen. If you want to “avoid ewaste” why not “mandate” more than the least common denominator?
If iPhone users were satisfied with the least common denominator, they would be buying cheap Android phones.
So you think the people shooting 4K video and taking RAW pictures are posting them to Instagram?
The lowest common denominator is the same reason that Bluetooth outside of the Apple ecosystem is such a shit show.
Android has supported its own proprietary video over micro USB for ages before USB C became more ubiquitous. What are the chances that Android manufactures won’t cheap out and not ship with cables that can support video over USB?
people who know what shooting 4k video means or what RAW format is is probably way less than 10% of all users of smartphones.
and I am probably overestimating by order of magnitude.
Most people shoot photos and show them to their friends online. Some of them even share it through sites like Instagram and Facebook or WhatsApp and similar.
And that is where it ends for most normal people.
As long as the cable can charge the phone, it will do for the most buyers.
people who earn on twitch, instagram, etc use dslr or mirrorless cameras, unless the video requires a phone in hand.
I know the "standard setup" shown in media, and advertisements, etc shows a ring light with a cellphone using the front facing camera as the recording device, that's just not technologically feasible.
And for the record, i move 4k and/or 108MP images from my phones via wifi or cellular, using synology diskstation autosync or syncthing, respectively. I've used syncthing to upload unedited 4k30p drone footage with no issues, and when i get home, it will sync to hard disks in addition.
