Comment by heavyset_go
11 hours ago
> If it's such a superior product that people want despite the tradeoffs, why don't they just fund a company to create such a phone? Why doesn't anyone?
Because legislation is direct and gives better results to consumers. Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C.
There's no reason to jump through extra hoops and rely on the whims of investors to do something good for the people.
>Thank god the EU standardized on USB-C
Short term thinking, if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape, it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector.
(1) The EU fundamentally didn't care which standard so long as there was one; they only forced this because Apple dragged their feet with their own proprietary thing that wasn't a significant advantage. The other end of Apple's Lightning port being a USB port does not suggest it added anything except deliberate incompatibility.
(2) what would "significantly better" even look like? USB-C can do 120 watts, enough to fill a 20 Wh battery in 10 minutes, except the batteries themselves aren't ready to charge that fast.
(3) if someone somehow manages to make a significant advance, nothing prevents them from having two ports. Or indeed lobbying for a law change on the basis of a tangible thing they can demonstrate rather than a hypothetical that still hasn't happened in all the time since these discussions began.
The same Europeans that were miles ahead with their GSM standard?
We can compare that to the US. Here, we stayed stuck with power-thirsty analog phones for many years before bouncing through a litany of mutually-incompatible digital non-standards...and finally landed on the ~same actual-standards that Europe adopted.
I think they'll be OK. (I think the rest of us will be OK, too.)
With that attitude, we’d still be using D-sub connectors.
I assume OP thinks more like me: the EU will move to the next standard in a reasonable amount of time after it's available.
I'll be the first to complain if the new standard isn't adopted in due time, but as a strong example I'm still very content with how the GSM legislation standard has played out.
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This is fully on Apple themselves. USB consortium asked apple to use lightning for what became USB-C, but Apple didn't want to give up the ecosystem control.
What does that have to do with the EU requiring everyone to use the USB-C connector?
The EU could have made a different decision. Or not got itself involved.
You're aware the maker of the lightning connector helped produce the USB-C standard in the same year they created lightning?
> The design for the USB‑C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc., with the help of Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
So?
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What does any deity have to do with it? Btw, has anyone done a post mortem analysis of that mandate? I wonder if it delivered what it promised. I doubt it:
All they saved consumers from is buying a 5 dollar replacement cable.
The EU certainly hasn't done such an assessment yet.
The predicted savings of a quarter billion Euro come mostly from unbundling chargers, which they could have forced down customers throats without also making technical mandates about how customers are allowed to charge.
Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.
How much cool aid do you have to drink to genuinely believe the corporate argument that using proprietary connectors is "innovative"?
> Unbundling charger without standardizing the connectors would result in every manufacturer using their own proprietary bespoke charging connectors. Which is exactly what the situation was before usb was made mandatory.
Eh, no? USB-C was already pretty much the standard before, and you could plug in lightning cable with a cheap adapter cable.
Not even that.
Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break.
And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
I don't understand your issue with USB C. Mini and micro USB connectors routinely got loose and fell out of multiple devices I owned, USB C is everywhere now and I have not encountered such issues.
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> Not even that. > > Consumers still need to buy replacement cables, because they break. > > And the USB-C cable end connector is a fragile piece of shit designed by committee and forced upon everyone buy another committee, neither of which must’ve had a single mechanic engineer even once walk passed their bike shed.
Well, the USB committee did ask Apple for the superior connector, but for whatever reason they said no. So we're stuck with this.
OTOH, USB-C is not nearly as bad as your bizarre post would seem to imply. It could be better, but as we know from experience with things like micro-USB, it could be much, much worse.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged. > > Or some other equally as dreadful outcome befitting the UBS-C Bike Shed & Enforcement Committee formerly know as the European Union.
Russia can't even handle Ukraine, a country significantly smaller in population, economy, and land area than Russia. And you think that they could take on the EU‽ A block, mind you, which has more population and a significantly larger economy. Oh, also nukes.
And you think that the EU would fall in this case because of... USB-C? Please explain the mechanism which would lead to this situation.
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I don't mind USB-C. Most of my devices have USB-C charging, and it works well.
I mind bureaucrats locking that in.
> Future historians will do a postmortem on the EU and discover the USB-C enforcement act as an inflection point that marked the downer trend to the EU’s eventual collapse, and the reclamation of its land and people to the great nation of Russia, where it always belonged.
Haha, what? I like to complain about this piece of legislation, but it's not that important. And it's not like Russia has better policy. Oh, just the opposite. (Like waging wars they can't win, or running crazy high corruption.)
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