Posted on 10/04/2022 11:56:45 PM PDT by Cronos
The EU parliament on Tuesday passed a new law requiring USB-C to be the single charger standard for all new smartphones, tablets and cameras from late 2024.
The measure, which EU lawmakers adopted with a vote 602 in favour, 13 against, will — in Europe at least — push Apple to drop its outdated Lightning port on its iPhones for the USB-C one already used by many of its competitors. Makers of laptops will have extra time, from early 2026, to also follow suit.
EU policymakers say the single charger rule will simplify the life of Europeans, reduce the mountain of obsolete chargers and reduce costs for consumers.
It is expected to save at least 200 million euros ($195m) per year and cut more than a thousand tonnes of EU electronic waste every year, the bloc’s competition chief Margrethe Vestager said.
The EU move is expected to ripple around the world.
The European Union’s 27 countries are home to 450 million people who count among the world’s wealthiest consumers. Regulatory changes in the bloc often set global industry norms in what is known as the Brussels Effect.
“Today is a great day for consumers, a great day for our environment,” Maltese MEP Alex Agius Saliba, the European Parliament’s pointman on the issue, said.
“After more than a decade, the single charger for multiple electronic devices will finally become a reality for Europe and hopefully we can also inspire the rest of the world,” he said.
Spot on, Irishjuggler. I was going to say the same thing, but probably less eloquently.
I’ve always been an Android person and I love USB-C. And I’ve been through several charger connection types and I was really glad to see it finally come to something like this.
Notice it happened without government intervention too. And that’s the real story here. A government trying to control people down to what kind of plugs their phones have. And in the United States we have the government doing the same thing”for our own good”. e.g. banning incandescent light bulbs, controlling how much water our shower heads can release, controlling how much water our toilets can hold, etc.
The story here is government controlling what people can buy and own. The comical part is, like you said, capitalism was headed in that direction anyway. I guess they just wanted to speed it up. Well, and be able to say they did it.
And on his question: if those strats are actually true, what is the problem? Why are prices spiking the way they are? This should be something that is easily absorbed into very minor changes in lifestyle.
If the challenges this is creating our legitimate I can only think of one real reason. That reason is that we simply want as much energy as we need, and when we don’t have enough, even by a small amount, I’ll hell breaks loose.
CONTROL!!
Yeah but eventually the marketplace standardises on something, and the players that insist on having something totally unique eventually suffer.
There’s a reason nobody talks about replacing the established wall socket standards for electrical appliances. You could have a better design but why bother? A socket’s a socket. Unless the entire grid is completely altered there’s no market incentive to deviate from the defacto standard that already exists.
Legacy USB designs were poor. But I’ve had far more failures with lightning kit than with USB kit. USB-C solves the issues, there really isn’t a good enough reason to develop yet another form.
The biggest screwup in the smart home industry has been vendor-locked closed standards with high prices. For almost no big outlay I converted my whole house to voice controls using ubiquitous protocols and an on-premise firewalled admin server. It’s linked to heat and power controls, and sensors. And it’s future proofed.
My broadband router is Fritz Box and they’re unusual in that they develop their firmware in-house and then enhance it to make it interoperable. No cheap Chinese knock-off firmware vulnerability, but still talks to anything I need it to. I even have it reporting the broadband and phone line status to the smart hub, with logic from the meters confirming if an outage is due to a power cut or a line fault.
I know people who threw thousands at home automation that can’t do a tenth as much, and their kit is junk value now - can’t talk to the newer kit, subscription model, managed obsolescence...
I can’t imagine what a mess it would be if every car manufacturer had a unique size and thread pitch on all their nuts and bolts. With some things industry standards do work and are needed. We are fortunate there were historically only three standards and now only one.
And she paid $1,000+ for it.
We recently went on vacation and I took 300+ photos with my phone.But I had to text each one of them to her because she has no SD card.
Standards are one thing, a law is another.
This isn't about consumer rights, this is about forcing manufacturers to adopt an interface to facilitate government seizure and downloads of data directly from the device.
Yeah but eventually the marketplace standardises on something, and the players that insist on having something totally unique eventually suffer.
One reason I’m sort of amused by this is that I have a box of power supplies I’ve collected over the decades. They have all sorts of unique plugs. I notice the government didn’t get involved with them.
On a side note, my wife’s new iPhone came with a charging cord, but no charger. And it uses a USB C plug for the “big” end that would plug into a charger. We have TONS of chargers and not a one uses that plug as an outlet. In fact, I just installed 25 wall outlets in my new music room and attached porch. About half have USB plugs. Not one of them is “C”.
Apparently, recent iPhones don’t come with a charger or earphones.
A while back, I got in an argument with an Apple fanboi who was all puffed up with pride that he got “free” headphones with his iPhone. I pointed out that everything that came with the phone was figured into the price, and that nothing was free. He couldn’t accept something so obvious.
Now that person must be so hurt and disillusioned that the evil capitalists at Apple aren’t giving away free stuff any more.
LOL! I must have at least 25 of them!
Because no Deep State on the planet likes free markets.
I’m about ready to go back to two tins cans attached by a string, and a gramophone....
I’ve bought a couple small chargeable items recently that use the USB-C.
I had no idea what it was until I asked my kid what it was called so I could go to Five Below and spend $5 on a charging cable.
Wow! $5. Not really worth making a law on.
I recall a story of a Sony shareholder meeting where stockholder Martha Stewart stood up and pulled a mess of chargers from a bag. She asked the CEO why Sony couldn’t make a single charger for all devices.
She was then informed that the Charger Division was the most profitable business unit in Sony.
“Never mind.”
This EU law is not for the people, its to punish the producers and ruin their intellectual property
No it’s not.
In a past life I did CE testing for consumer laptops. Amongst other things, we tested to see what would happen if one got run over by a car while in a bag, how well did it cope with a really dodgy power supply, and how far can you drop it before it shatters into fragments.
A common safety hazard in the UK is where people buy cheap non-CE marked counterfeit phone chargers or rechargeable kit, leave them on overnight, and they catch fire.
The CE standard basically means maybe a cent is added to the build price to ensure that that sort of thing is very unlikely to happen.
Basically, if something has a CE mark (and it’s genuine) the manufacturer can add 30p markup to something for a 1p spend, and the average consumer can save 30p if they’re willing to risk their house burning down.
How does that ruin their intellectual property? The money Apple wasted designing the Lightning connector could just as easily have been spent adopting USB-C and charging £silly for an Apple branded cable, which is exactly what they are doing now.
It’s the EU, and it’s what you get under socialist rule. Of course, we’re close to being under it here in the U.S. as well.
The Free market died in the 20th century.
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