Apple Will Be Forced To Use New Charger After EU Votes for USB-C (bloomberg.com) 314
Members of the European Parliament voted to force companies such as Apple to adapt products that don't already feature a standard USB-C charger to use one. This would include iPhones, in Apple's case. From a report: A total of 602 lawmakers voted for the plan on Tuesday, with 13 against, and eight abstaining. The deal, provisionally agreed in June between the commission and the European Union's 27 countries, still needs to get the final sign-off from the EU member states. The rules are likely to be written into law at the beginning of 2023.
Wireless charging? (Score:2)
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I believe that previous articles stated that *if* there was a cable to charge, it was going to have to be USB-C.
Further, if wireless charging, then there was no stipulation about using a standard, however even if there was Apple would likely be fine since they do work with Qi charging.
Some have speculated that Apple would go portless rather than do USB-C. This would of course mean that phone charging would now be throwing away a significant chunk of energy for the sake of not having a port.
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Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
That have been waterproof USB-C ports for years, it is not exactly rocket science. Hell Sony had waterproof 3.5mm stereo jack plugs back in the 1980's.
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Of course, that would screw themselves over. They already have standard USB-PD for their laptops, so to not support USB-PD just pisses off their customers, and there's really no room to claim that a different power negotiation protocol gives them benefit (unless somehow they managed over 240W charging in a phone, which would be pretty unlikely).
I would not be surprised if data transfer is slow though. It's all about that iCloud.
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It doesn't piss me off at all. Lightening has worked really well for me. I have a laptop and a phone, for which I have two cables that I can connect simultaneously. It doesn't bother me that they're different cables.
What pisses me off is that the next phone I buy will probably force me to throw away the cables I've got and possibly buy new ones. There are lots of people out there with stereo with iPhone docks - what will happen with these? Talk about the EU shooting themselves in the foot and creating e-
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The iPhone docks will eventually end up in thrift stores on the shelf which currently has the iPod and old iPhone docks with the proprietary Apple 30 pin connectors
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I was stating that if they went for a proprietary protocol over USB-C to enable fast charging, it would piss off Apple customers since that would be utterly senseless frustration of having identical plugs that behave different between their laptops and their phones.
I can see the frustration of changing cables when the existing cables are just fine. Of course Apple users have been subjected to this by Apple themselves (30-pin to lightning, removal of USB-A when a lot of accessories need USB-A). It might have
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There are lots of people out there with stereo with iPhone docks - what will happen with these?
The same thing that happened when Apple ditched their original iDevice connector in favor of lightning.
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The waste will happen once for anyone who has equipment using non standard cables, and then in future much less waste will be produced because a lot of the cables and chargers will be reusable.
Most of the non standard cables would end up as waste anyway as soon as you replaced the equipment it was paired with. I have various non standard chargers that only ever worked with 1 model of a specific type of device. Doing away with these single use cables in favor of reusable cables that will fit a huge variety o
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Another thing they can do, since you can layer all sorts of stuff on top of the physical USB-C interface, e.g. TB3/TB4, is that Apple can easily implement an "enhanced" USB-C that's as Apple-proprietary as Lightning is now, falling back to a "compatibility-mode" USB-C that charges at 5V / 500mA and runs 12 Mbps data. Then the EU will have to go through a second round of lawmaking, and possibly a third, as they keep evading being non-proprietary, or at least crippling the standard form of the interface so everyone still has to use the Apple-proprietary one.
Lightning exists because there wasn't anything else capable of doing what a lightning port does. USB-C came along much later.
Lightning continues to exist because switching to USB-C offers no advantage to anyone that already has an iPhone, but does require existing users to throw out their cables and accessories and buy new ones.
The only benefit of switching iPhones to USB-C ports is it'll take away one thing Android users like to complain about that didn't impact them in any way.
Doing that stuff you suggest
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Lightning continues to exist because switching to USB-C offers no advantage to anyone that already has an iPhone, but does require existing users to throw out their cables and accessories and buy new ones.
Technically, Apple has let it languish and USB-C has much much faster data transfer speeds than Lightning ever supported. Of course data transfer over cable is 'lame' now in favor of iCloud for everything.
Doing that stuff you suggest would just make things worse for everyone involved.
The debate is short term versus long term. In the short term, absolutely it made some things obsolete (though Mac users love their dongles, so a lightning-to-usb-c adapter could exist to bridge a lot of those accessories). In the long term, it takes the fragmented mobile device charging ecosystem and co
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Apple at least follows the Qi standard for wireless charger so that charging pad can work on just about any other device with wireless charging.
Lightning cables don't even work with all of Apple's other products anymore. The iPad has been USB-C for a couple generationsnow at least.
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iPad Air is C, iPad Mini is C, iPad is still lightning.
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not an arbitrary decision.
I'm really tired of "gubbmint si teh evul" line. It doesn't add anything to the discussion. No one actually believes it because they're not missing from the government free libertarian paradise of whichever failed state is preferred today. But it's really easy to take a hard line when you don't have to live by it.
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You may be way too young to remember, but for a long time U.S. cars had vastly inferior headlights, in the name of safety, because a commission had decided what "safe" was and mandated it. European versions of the cars could have newer headlights, brighter but with good cut-offs (don't blind on-coming drivers) and self-aiming. We wer
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes people in the EU did imagine it. If you had bothered to read the treaties it was obvious that it was going to come along. A large point of the EU was to create a single market and that only works if everyone is using the same standards. At some point in time, you need to pick a standard and mandate its use. Imagine if every state in the USA used a different electrical outlet?
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Compaq and Tandy were famous for installing custom hard drive interfaces in the 1980s. We're better off for the standardization that followed.
So standardization happened without the help of any government? Wow, you just illustrated how the EU decision is superfluous.
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Now, with late stage capitalism, companies will reinvent the wheel their own proprietary way for "number must go up".
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Sometimes it happens without government. Tandy's computer business eventually failed and Compaq lost market share until it didn't have the clout to carry on with a proprietary interface. You see Dell pulling some of the same shit though, non-standard motherboards and cases, non standard power supplies... Because they are big enough to get away with it.
And that's the problem with Apple. As a fashion brand they can be customer hostile, and they care little for the environmental impact of their products.
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Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone in an EU nation imagine, when the EU was formed, that the EU would dictate to all its members what sort of chargers or adapters they could use for electrical devices?
Yes, of course. The EU was created with two goals in mind:
1. Easier trade, through harmonized standards and rules.
2. Greater sovereignty and clout to make international corporations bend to the member state's will.
Every now and then, it's a lovely thing to see elected or unelected officials (or both!) pontificate openly about some (potentially) petty nonsense like what sort of charger you must use with one specific electronic device, only to be slapped around and humiliated with the realization that they just don't have the power to make those decisions.
The EU does have the power, that's what makes it great. Look at the UK, isolated and alone, will be forced to adopt this rule whether it likes it or not. The EU enacted the will of the people, through their elected representatives, instead of the will of Apple.
It's hardly "petty" either, it's a very anti-consumer choice to use a non-standard charger, and creates excessive e-waste.
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I wonder how much waste will be generated in the transition period? Instead of being able to use the cables and chargers I already have, now I have to get new cables or adapters.
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Depends if your phone enters landfill before it is no longer useful or not.
On that note Apple does provide OS updates for longer than most, but also doesn't allow you to replace the OS with your own which can substantially extend the life of devices.
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I wonder how much waste will be generated in the transition period? Instead of being able to use the cables and chargers I already have, now I have to get new cables or adapters.
It was obviously OK with you when Apple forced you to get new cables or adapters from whatever you had before, but you're complaining now that the EU is taking steps to reduce waste in the future? You know time only runs one way and they can't go back and reduce it in the past, right? The best way to do that (if you could) would be to stop Apple from making their proprietary cables for the purpose of collecting royalty payments in the first place. It provably was not for the purpose of offering the consumer
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Overall, the EU mandating one charger has been a good thing. Remember how it was before the EU initially got device makers to standardize on something, be it Micro USB, Lightning, or USB-C?
Every device had a unique connector, be it a 30-pin style like the earlier iPhones, barrel connectors, rectangular connectors similar to Lenovo power, and many other shapes. Even if a connector physically fit, you had no clue if it had the same pinouts, voltages, polarities, or anything, and mismatching could result in
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
that the EU would dictate to all its members what sort of chargers or adapters they could use for electrical devices?
The standard was chosen by industry, not the governments. But one monopolistic hold-out refused to join in.
Sadly, when corporations behave badly, we require the regulators to step in for the public (consumer) good.
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:4, Interesting)
"But one monopolistic hold-out refused to join in."
Apple is a member of the USB Implementers Forum and has a seat on its Board of Directors. That's pretty much the opposite of "hold-out refused to join in".
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Because they use the USB spec on their proprietary connector. Otherwise they couldn't actually call it a lighting to USB cable.
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And yet they maintain their own competing standard and fit it to half their devices.
iPhones get Lightning, iPads and laptops get USB C. Want to use the same accessory on all your devices? Apple says no.
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apple is a member of the USB Implementers Forum and has a seat on its Board of Directors. That's pretty much the opposite of "hold-out refused to join in".
No, it actually makes it more true, because Apple was already a member of the USB-IF when they created the Lightning cable and connector. The opposite of "hold-out refused to join in" would have been Apple bringing their new connector to the USB-IF and proposing it as a standard, instead of pairing it with a DRM chip that meant anyone making a lightning cable had to pay royalties to Apple.
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:4)
Apple is a member of the USB Implementers Forum and has a seat on its Board of Directors. That's pretty much the opposite of "hold-out refused to join in".
And Microsoft is a member of the Linux Foundation and therefore Windows is magically open source right?
Honestly did you not stop and think how incredibly stupid your post was before you hit submit?
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If it was so bad, people would not have bought it. The fact that you don't like the Lightning connector doesn't make Apple a "bad" player.
Now, if any other vendor wants to try a new connector that might be better, well, they cannot. We're stuck with USB-C until the EU decides otherwise. I'm not thrilled about that.
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It's about overreach.
No it isn't.
Did anyone in an EU nation imagine, when the EU was formed, that the EU would dictate to all its members what sort of chargers or adapters they could use for electrical devices?
That's just a stupid question, frankly. No, the EU didn't predict the rise of portable electronics, because that's not their job. Yes they have been standardising stuff since inception because that is their job. And do you know what the point of a legislature is? It's to mass new legislation in order
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It isn't about evil. It's about overreach. Did anyone in an EU nation imagine, when the EU was formed, that the EU would dictate to all its members what sort of chargers or adapters they could use for electrical devices?
Without the EU forcing them we'd still have every phone with a slightly different charging connector. Even different models from the same company would have different connectors. Micro USB is shitty as far as connectors go but at least every phone used it.
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
The US has had standard plugs for electrical devices for decades. What was the last time you bought a microwave, or television, or toaster and it had a non-standard plug to go into the wall?
If the government can standardize the plugs on the wall side of the power cable, why shouldn't they standardize the plug on the device side of the cable? There may well be a good reason, so I'm asking sincerely.
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If the market doesn't standardise, then sometimes government needs to force things.
The EU doing it just carries a bit more weight, if greece decided to standardise while the rest of the EU did not some companies would simply drop greece as a target market. Very few companies would be willing to drop the entire EU.
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Re: Wireless charging? (Score:3)
Planes and airports cost more than people. Thatâ(TM)s what the TSA is responsible for. I get your point but way wrong and horrible analogy
Re:Wireless charging? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the contrary. EU legislation is already why we got to be rid of the zillions of special snowflake chargers for phones in favor of USB. Perhaps you don't remember when even different models from the same manufacturer often had different incompatible chargers and if it broke, you had to order a new one for several times what it should cost (and if it broke while traveling, you were SOL). Somehow, wireless charging evolved with that in place as an adjunct charging method.
BTW, the other big complaint people had here when that legislation went into place is that they would never ever for any reason update the standard to allow newer standards, yet here we are with an updated standard...
Re: Wireless charging? (Score:3)
In what way is it superior? It's a design that puts the springs in the port rather than the cable. That means the first component to wear out is the phone, not the cable. I've seen iphone users with this problem all too often, basically when they charge their phone, they have to position the cable just right or else it will simply fall out because the springs in the port have worn out. USB-C doesn't have this problem, if the springs are worn out, no problem, just replace the cable (cheap) rather than the wh
Torn (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. USB-C is a good standard (physically and logically), but what if it wasn't? USB Mini and USB Micro both sucked in comparison to Apple's Lightning - for example neither of those USB standards had reversible connectors, and were inferior in amperage, throughput, etc. What if the EU decided to force Apple to use USB Mini? Or something else sub-standard? Lightning was greatly ahead of USB technologically for many years (and of course I'm talking about actual use in products with an entire ecosystem of supporting products and hardware, not just some spec on paper).
Not everything should be designed by consortium (or worse, by government), and just because a product reaches some level of success that it sees widespread adoption doesn't mean that it can no longer innovate. What if Apple comes out with something even better than USB-C or Lightning?
In reality this isn't a huge deal, because Apple has already embraced USB-C. New iPads use USB-C instead of Lightning, and the Macbooks basically have nothing but USB-C ports now (for charging, etc). However my hunch is that Apple's plan is to drop the charging port entirely at some point, just like they dropped the 3.5mm audio port (that everyone threw a fit about, yet all other cell manufactures immediately followed suit). So that is probably what they will do if the EU forces them - totally remove the port and only support wireless charging. That deflects some of the criticism for the move away from Apple to the EU.
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I have been using reversible microUSB leads exclusively for about 8 years now. What's this none reversible microUSB you are on about?
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It's not part of the standard, which is why you didn't see those shipped with any cell phones. Also it may be patent encumbered by whatever company came up with that non-standard modification to the connector design. That fact of the matter is it is not USB compliant and thus cannot be officially labeled as such. That basically shuts it down as far as any official support by any OEM manufacturers.
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I have also been using them. But I threw them all away at some point. Just because, over time, they kill the USB port on the devices, even if it's not easy to see it. They mostly wear the original connector, so that you can only use those reversible cables and the standard cable just disconnects if you try to use it afterwards.
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But my real reason for this post is to note that I've never heard of such a thing so I googled it (err.... amazoned it). The very first result ("Amazon's choice") boasts as one of its features: "Resistant to plug & play". Hmm.
Re:Torn (Score:5, Insightful)
just like they dropped the 3.5mm audio port (that everyone threw a fit about, yet all other cell manufactures immediately followed suit)
And to this day I remain incredibly pissed about it. Cell phone manufacturers seem to think because Apple or "the other guy" did it, that means more sales. Nope, I'm forced to use tech I hate because I can't buy tech I like. Give me a high-end phone with a slide-out physical keyboard and a headphone jack and I'll be happy again while I type accurately and listen to music without a stupid adapter. News flash to cell phone manufacturers: many cars don't support bluetooth audio but do support an aux port, and that aux port will provide better audio quality than bluetooth if the car has it.
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Samsung still have 3.5 jacks in their latest phones. TBH the sort of hipsters who'll burn a grand on a phone wouldn't be seen dead with wired headphones anyway - they need those apple earpods to demonstrate to anyone looking that they're part of the more-money-than-sense tribe.
Re:Torn (Score:4)
Re:Torn (Score:5, Informative)
You know you can get a free iPhone with most cell service plans, right?
It's not really free. I pay $40/month for my phone service with a major carrier. My partner, on the same carrier, pays $80/month to get that "free phone". That's a difference of $940 for those "couple of years".
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To be fair a USB C to 3.5mm adapter is cheap and effective.
You can even build one with inline controls, very handy for hands-free use in the car if you stick the controller to the dash. Just get a cheap pair of USB C headphones with inline controls, cut the cable and attach your own 3.5mm jack.
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Jobs was just as bad. iMacs with no floppy drives, no ADB or whatever it was called for keyboards and mice, no parallel/serial, no SCSI. Just USB 1.1.
It is annoying to lose the headphone jack, I won't argue with that. Just saying that there are good alternatives IF you have a USB C port.
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Jobs was just as bad. iMacs with no floppy drives, no ADB or whatever it was called for keyboards and mice, no parallel/serial, no SCSI. Just USB 1.1.
iMac 1.0 was patterned directly after the original Macintosh, which had all the same limitations (except it did have serial ports, you couldn't build a computer without them...) Not including ADB or serial ports was outright abusive. Luckily that backfired on Apple, I almost never see official Apple dongles for that stuff but I see third party ones all the time. SCSI was not as problematic an omission, since most Macintosh users with SCSI stuff probably weren't in the market for an iMac anyway.
And the ports
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I'm not sure that's true. the lack of ADB ports only really affected existing Mac users who had a keyboard they continued to want to use, which wasn't a huge number.
I suspect it was more significant than you'd know. There was a period in there where most macs (esp. performas [youtube.com]) came with keyboards, but the keyboards sucked. A better keyboard, if you bought it from Apple, could cost $200 (for the Apple Extended Keyboard II, for example.) And it was hard to find a non-Apple keyboard for your Apple.
The lack of floppies came at a time when pretty much everyone recognized the format was useless. If you already had a Mac, you were going to copy files to your iMac over a network. If you didn't, you didn't have any floppies.
Unless you were buying a Macintosh to replace a Macintosh which had failed, in which case you still had floppies and had to get someone else to help you transfer them. Also, IME
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They didn't and it wasn't. That implies, you see, that there was some alternative data exchange mechanism. Here's what we had in 1998:
1. Floppies. Slow, small, but works everywhere.
2. CD-R. Drives are expensive. Media is expensive. Not all PCs had CD drives, quite a few older ones had drives which didn't work properly with CD-Rs.
3. USB stick. Doesn't exist yet. Also Windows 98 bluescreens 7 times in 8 if you plug in a USB device, never mind Windows 95.
4. Internet. Lol no.
5. Zip drives. Maybe the tech of the
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Ha, glad I'm not the only one still pining for a built in physical keyboard that slides out. I'd still be using my old Motorola Droid if it wasnt so massively under powered at this point.
I'd rather have the 3.5mm audio port as well but fuck do I miss having a real keyboard.
Re:Torn (Score:5, Informative)
I'm not sure how I feel about this. USB-C is a good standard (physically and logically), but what if it wasn't?
What if pigs flew? Then they could shit on you as easily as I'm going to shit on that argument. Whoops, I just did.
USB Mini and USB Micro both sucked in comparison to Apple's Lightning - for example neither of those USB standards had reversible connectors, and were inferior in amperage, throughput, etc.
The maximum speed over Lightning is the same as USB 2.0. Lightning has shit power delivery. It's only 12W with all Apple branded equipment, which in case you didn't notice is only 20% more than USB2. You can get somewhere around 35W, but only with third party hardware. USB-PD can now deliver 240W. It's past time to let Lightning die, but Apple isn't doing that because they are making money selling licensed, proprietary, DRM-restricted cables that were designed first and foremost to cost you money. And here you are, carrying water for them. Slap a steak over that eye and get out of that abusive relationship.
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Government mandates are all well and good until they mandate something bad. I realised the other day that I can't import more than 2lb of raw honey from USA. I've no particular idea why. One hopes there's a good and rational reason for it. But bureaucracy isn't famous for that.
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I realised the other day that I can't import more than 2lb of raw honey from USA. I've no particular idea why. One hopes there's a good and rational reason for it.
I assure you that there is not. It doesn't matter if you import 2lb or 20lb, either way you still shouldn't give a single spoonful to an infant. If they were trying to protect people (which would still have been stupid) they would have outlawed importing it at all.
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You've missed the entire point of my argument, which is not which technology is better in 2022, but whether or not government should be dictating technology of this sort in the first place.
No, I caught your entire argument, you're just wrong.
You're fine with this because you like USB technology NOW, in 2022, but my point is before USB-C gained prominence that USB Micro was inferior to Lightning, and I'm totally correct in that regard.
No, you're almost completely incorrect in that regard. The insertion cycles are similar, the power delivery is almost identical, and the speeds have always been identical. USB2 came out in 2000, The USB Micro connector didn't come out until 2007. Lightning came out in 2012. There has literally never been a time when USB Micro was slower than Lightning. There is exactly one significant benefit to Lightning over USB Micro for the end user, and that is that
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Oh yeah and hate to double reply, but I forgot to roast you for this:
USB Micro only supports 1 amp of power delivery, which is only 5 watts.
This is complete bullshit and this alone proves you have no clue whatsoever. USB Micro is rated for 9W, but any USB Micro cable worth owning will deliver at least 15W. USB 2.0 is specced for 10W, and unless your cable is total garbage, you will definitely be able to get 10W through it. I have a USB volt/amp meter which I use to determine whether charging is completed on devices which don't have a clear signal to tell you, and I've seen 11W
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I'm not sure how I feel about this. USB-C is a good standard (physically and logically), but what if it wasn't? .... What if the EU decided to force Apple to use USB Mini? Or something else sub-standard?
This seems a really odd line of argument to take.
What if the government had done something they didn't do, and never will, that would have made me unhappy.
So now I'm going to be unhappy, or "torn".
What if they legislated that all phones had to be purple, with sparkles? What if they said we were only allowed to dial with our feet? What if they didn't allow phones at all?
I get it, you decided you wanted to be unhappy and are desperately grasping for a reason why.
How about, why should the EU require phones to
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If USB had been crap they probably wouldn't have standardized on it. What a bizarre bit of hand wringing.
Lightning was briefly ahead of USB C, for the 2 years between the release of the two. USB C is vastly superior though. A great example is the Lightning to HDMI adapter. It's a system-on-chip internally that runs a VNC client. The phone encodes the screen, sends it over USB, the SoC decodes it and outputs HDMI. Nice and laggy, chews up the battery, frame rate all over the place.
USB C just supports HDMI ov
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Lightning was briefly ahead of USB C, for the 2 years between the release of the two.
What? No it wasn't. The only thing Lightning has over USB-C is that the connector can bear more side loading. USB-C has always been as fast or faster, and has always delivered more power.
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They have technical advisors employed to make sure they don't make that kind of mistake. Experts with experience, who talk to device manufacturers and standards bodies like the USB-IF.
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I suppose you have to imagine the PR blowback to Apple on that one, especially when there are billions(?) of their devices out there. Yeah, we're not talking 1.21 gigawatts for a phone, but that 40% will start adding up.
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I, for one, think it's a terrible decision.
There's things that the free market is terrible at, and many places that market failures arise, but this is not one of them.
Most of the industry has standardized around USB-C, so a law mandating USB-C is useless in that regard.
The only real effect is forcing Apple to change their chargers. Presumably Apple, a ridiculously profitable and successful company, has good motives for continuing to use Lightning chargers, so why is the EU deciding that Apple is wrong and t
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Well... only to a point. IMHO, the USB-C connector is flimsy and the contacts are delicate. A better design for certain applications might be a magsafe version.
Does this apply to laptops too? (Score:5, Informative)
It beggars belief that Apple are still clinging to Lightning, really. 12W, USB2 and 500-ish Mbps, compared to USB-C's 240W, USB4 and 40Gbps. If you want fast charging (by which they still only mean 20W) you have to buy a lightning cable... and a USB-C to lightning converter. FFS.
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you have to buy a lightning cable... and a USB-C to lightning converter.
Why not just use the USB-C to lightning cable included with all new iPhones since the 12? Or buy a USB C to lightning cable instead of buying a whatever kind of cable you were thinking of.
Until USB-D comes along (Score:3)
While I understand the need to constantly upgrade the USB spec does it really require so many different connector types?
USB A (vers 1/2 or 3), B, mini A/B, micro A/B, C
I mean fecking seriously?? Even with video is now pretty much down to HMDI vs DisplayPort and they're different systems, not purporting to be the same one.
Obligatory: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]
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As in no new device should be coming with any A or B ports anymore.
I but I think licensing? spec (non)-compliance? that things still are not.
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It's got to be cheaper to make a USB micro connector than any other kind of USB connector. USB A has to have that weird plastic insert inside of the shell, or a PCB insert. USB Micro has a more convoluted shell, putting more bends in a piece of steel costs more money because it takes more steps. Type C has more contacts.
Now What? (Score:2)
Question! Cause of the paywall (Score:2)
Not a big deal for them. (Score:2)
They've already had usb-c charge ports on phones in the factors needed. It's not like they're going to have to break new ground.
Plus, with USB-D on the horizon, it'll all change again, of course!
Standards are better than Walled Gardens (Score:5, Interesting)
Standards are always better than the walled gardens, and as I've been around for a while I can assure everyone that if a corps can enforce and are allowed they'll always go with a walled garden - it's been so in every branch of industry, and the only way out of such lockups are government regulations or when a company is loosing the market share due to some reasons (which becomes less likely the longer the patented or trademarked gardens are).
We - consumers - are much better of with standardized interfaces, which I hope will come to software APIs and documents formats some day as well. And even though I like the Apple connector better, I'd still support USB-C as a standard.
It's better, when a user can replace tires from the brand he/she likes or some bolts or wheels, or HDD, SDD, monitor, memory, browser, now charger, etc. Would be great if ink cartridges, document editors.
Standards open the field for competition, some smaller companies filling the niches, which lower prices and improve customer experience. It happens that some standards get corrupted with time (especially in software) by injecting "proprietary" fields (e.g. DICOM, ODF), but it's still better than no standards at all.
Addressing the bias language in this article (Score:5, Insightful)
Europe is not "forcing" Apple to do anything. Apple is not the victim of an Orwellian government shoving committee-formed standards and practices on a forign corporation. Soldiers aren't arriving at Apple manufacturing facilities with boxes of USB-C ports and shouting at workers in German to install these or else.
Europe is "requiring" every cell phone manufacturer to comply with a universal charging standard in order to sell phones in Europe. This is no different from Europe requiring Apple to comply with European radio transmission laws or to manufacture phones for ROHS compliance to prevent mercury from entering landfills.
Apple is not "forced" to do anything, they could shrug and withdraw from the European market. You're likely reading this and thinking, "why would they give up such a valuable market?" and you've come to the core of the issue. Apple profits from selling proprietary chargers and cables, and they continue to profit by changing those every couple years. Apple, almost single-handedly, created the need for this regulation.
This kind of ongoing inflammatory language is why Bloomberg isn't a respectable news agency.
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A big part of it is sustained "trauma" from the early cell phone days where everybody and their mother had their own charge port design and devices often included a wired power brick, a lot of times with different voltages (I am pretty sure I have a 7.4V charger somwhere from days past). I think those of us alive and adults 20 years ago remember it was pretty wild and especially with the fact that despite the sterline reputation Nokia candybar phones had for reliability there was a lot of cheap garbage tha
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A big part of it is sustained "trauma" from the early cell phone days where everybody and their mother had their own charge port design and devices often included a wired power brick, a lot of times with different voltages (I am pretty sure I have a 7.4V charger somwhere from days past). I think those of us alive and adults 20 years ago remember it was pretty wild and especially with the fact that despite the sterline reputation Nokia candybar phones had for reliability there was a lot of cheap garbage that would last a few months.
This is one of those cases where it seems like, yeah, maybe the market forces alone could deal with it over a long enough time frame but they really have less incentive to than we think. When the EU decided on microUSB some time ago all these same discussions came up but in the end it was better for everybody.
True, the model was roughly like this:
1) Ship your expensive gadget with a proprietary connector.
2) Force user to pay exorbitant prices for a new charger
3) Profit!
The whippersnappers of today have no idea how good they have it now that everything charges using some form of USB charger and at-worst you have to endure the unimaginable suffering of buying a USB-C to lightning or USB-C to micro-USB adaptor to cover all your bases. That is also why they can pontificate about political ideology and the EU b
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Those odd voltages are often just to stop people using 3rd party chargers with a cheap adapter cable. The actual charging electronics are a switch mode power supply with very wide input range.
For example I have a Philips shaver that comes with a 15V charger with a stupid plug. I bought a USB to stupid plug adapter that is just a cable, it outputs the USB 5V. Charges fine, maybe a little bit slower but I do it overnight so don't care.
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I don't see why we can't just let manufacturers decide here.
You haven't been paying attention?
And it seems contradictory of the EU. One of their big reasons for standardizing is to reduce e-waste on chargers.
Oh, so you DO know, and you were just being disingenuous.
So Apple says okay we'll get on board with that, we'll remove the charger from the standard iPhone package, to encourage re-use of chargers. EU's like NO you can't do that either! So confusing.... some of their explanations just make NO sense.
I haven't seen that. I saw that Brazil forced them to include a charger, but not the EU. Do you have a citation? It's hard to find anything on this subject right now because all the search results are about Apple being forced to use usb-c.
In any case, Apple brought this on themselves. I'm not going to go back through the whole timeline of events again (I did it in a prior discussion on this subject, and if Slashdot we
iFanboys, your game is weak (Score:2, Insightful)
40% Flamebait
30% Insightful
30% Overrated
And not one citation for the EU forcing Apple to bundle chargers. The closest thing I found, which let me make clear is an anti-citation, was an article about Tesla no longer including their charging cable [electrek.co] which is compared to Apple's discontinuance of charger inclusion. This was in April of this year.
At this point every Apple user is demonstrating Stockholm syndrome. It's amazing how butt-hurt you get when someone shares facts about how their hardware is not only not
Re:lack of foresight (Score:5, Insightful)
So in other words the EU has a record of standardizing common practice without hurting future upgradeability of the standard. And you're whinging why precisely?
Do you also whine about the standardised NEMA plug (or shucko or BS1363 etc if you're not American)?
Or do you go about your day just fine because having a standardised power plug is a rather good idea.
And nobody is making the stupid claims you think because the real world isn't compelled to swing to wild extremes like you think it is.
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Politicians tend not to be the best experts on tech matters... If the connector is/was such an issue...don't buy the product. I like standards...so I buy things that conform to standards. If you buy non-standard items for the sake of making a fashion statement, don't bitch because you limited your options.
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Politicians tend not to be the best experts on tech matters...
do you complain about standardised mains connectors? Simple question.
If you buy non-standard items for the sake of making a fashion statement, don't bitch because you limited your options.
What the fuck are you even talking about?
Re:lack of foresight (Score:4, Informative)
USB Micro was never mandated, it was a strong reccomendation that most manufacturers chose to follow to avoid legislation. Certain manufacturers chose not to, so now we have the legislation. If something better comes along in ten years time, as USB-C did, then it allows for the standard to be updated.
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They would develop it for a purpose other than inclusion on cellphones in Europe, and then it could be made the standard USB connector by the USB-IF, of which Apple is a member. If they wanted their connector to be standard, they could have brought it to the USB-IF. But they wanted to use it explicitly to sell proprietary cables with a DRM chip in them, so as to produce licensing fees, so they made it deliberately incompatible instead. Now they're being forced to change it because their deliberately incompa
Re: (Score:2)
no need to carry a special adapter or charger => more liberating => more sales.
What it will do is force us to buy more dongles. Because here's the problem.
Not everything in this world stops and starts at the smartphone.
My living room furniture has Standard USB ports on it for charging. That's several dongles right there. I have 2 Jeeps that have standard USB ports for carplay. I already have problems with our new iphones. I have to keep old cables in order to tether things.
I think that perhaps the EU now needs to mandate that Autos and furniture have only one type of connecto
Re:I am honestly surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is correct. The primary complaints with Apple vis-a-vis repairability now are:
They actively prevent distribution of repair information.
They refuse to sell and forbid manufacturers from selling component level repair parts.
"Learning" a new fingerprint sensor requires a stunningly expensive machine that has extremely limited distribution.