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USB for smartphones? How is the government telling people what kind of ports to have a good thing? The market should make that decision, not a regulator. Toxins

USB for smartphones? How is the government telling people what kind of ports to have a good thing? The market should make that decision, not a regulator. Toxins kill stuff, a lack of USB could be considered and annoyance if you think USB is important. USB regulation is precisely the definition of “progressive” overreach. I don’t want any government dictating my device specifications (unless those specs are designed to reduce health risks or radio interference.)

akie 9y ago
He was talking about standardizing phone chargers to use (one of the) USB standard ones so you don’t end up with a drawer full of outdated and incompatible chargers.
FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago
No, it was extremely good and cool that the EU told corporations to stick to one standard. The market is terrible in making things convenient for consumers if they want to switch phones, as it doesn't make them money. Same with not creating bee-killing pesticides. The markets created them and never stopped despite them being extremely harmful to the environment. But who cares, under capitalism profits matter above all so let's continue producing them.
SllX 9y ago
Someone chime in and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but here's how I understand the "regulation". The EU decided that having a single standard port to charge a smartphone was a good idea and in the long run, save a little bit of money and a little bit on electronic waste since people would be able to go to any store and purchase for sale 1 Standard Smartphone Charger™ and 1 Standard Smartphone Cable™. Then they conferred their preference to the Smartphone Industry™ and said "Okay, you guys sort it out. Pick a standard, incorporate it going forward, or we will bring down the regulatory hammer and not even we want to do that." At that point USB was proving to be more or less a de facto standard anyway, so the industry said okay, settled on that, and somehow Apple got away with being able to just bundle in an adapter for the Standard Smartphone Cable™. The benefit of this approach rather than the EU swinging the regulatory hammer is it leaves the industry free to update it, say from micro-USB to USB-C, as improvements come along, rather than the EU decreeing that all smartphones use micro-USB which would be Terrible. Thus we have a Standard by Agreement, rather than a Standard by Law and life goes on pretty okay. For good or for ill, the EU has a massive amount of soft power in their lawmaking alone with repercussions that go beyond the 28 (soon to be 27 again) member states. Any smartphone designer is free to take their phone and go home, but that's a lot of money to leave on the table and its not like anybody particularly liked the old crappy connectors of the past.
- Symbiote 9y ago
  The recommendation is also for the port on the charger, which even on Apple chargers is standard USB-A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
- rbanffy 9y ago
  Your description is pretty much on the spot (IIRC) > soon to be 27 again My bet is still on a Norway-like solution, which saves (some) face for the Tories and has minimal consequences. But I am known to be an optimist from time to time.
hn0 9y ago
The regulation was because the companies were NOT competing in the market for phone chargers through vendor lock in. I don’t know about you but I’m glad I no longer have to keep a box with 30 different chargers anymore. More electronics jumped on the USB charging bandwagon and phone recharging stations are suddenly a thing. Apple somehow seems to have escaped the regulation, sadly.
- klaushougesen1 9y ago
  Apple categorises the iphone as a mini portable compute device - and thereby skirts the whole phone charger thing
- detaro 9y ago
  Apple's charger is compliant since it has an USB-A port and phone side you can use an adapter, which explicitly was allowed in the deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#R...
- murjinsee 9y ago
  In addition to competition, there were also safety issues with proprietary chargers. I personally experienced this, when I had an emergency and my LG Lotus was dead. I tried using a borrowed microUSB charger at the hospital, only to be presented with the message, "Please use an LG-branded charger." The power rating was identical; but, they had some kind of crazy, DRM-like scheme in place. I'm very glad that I can now use or buy a cable anywhere and use pretty much any block, even an inefficient one.
neuromute 9y ago
USB regulation imposed by the EU is a fantastic idea (in theory, at least). The amount of waste in the form of old proprietary device chargers is quite staggering and it poses an environmental problem. If all devices use USB, then this waste is somewhat reduced. ‘Almost every household is believed to have gathered a number of old chargers – estimated to generate more than 51 000 tons of electronic waste per year in the EU.’ [1] [1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/red-directive/common-charger_en http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/re...
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  Back when micro-usb was a thing, I accumulated an ungodly number of cables, way more than can be explained by obvious logic such as 'one per device'. At the time it was great because I never seemed to be more than ten feet from the cable I needed. Then came usb-c so I had to start all over, but I kept hold of all the old cables because of some weird hoarding instinct. A few weeks ago, I had to downgrade back from usb-c to micro and I am hugely relieved I kept all those old cables! Moral of the story: never throw out old cables ... (maybe)
  - hackbinary 9y ago
    It is now probably safe to dispose of your old mfm and SCSI cables. Probably even your parallel port cables can go as well. ;)
gkya 9y ago
Market tends to decide against the customers when it can. The market isn't the customers anyways, the market is those who live in their billion billion dollar bubbles and their employees. We the customers can not affect the decisions, but can only choose from the handful (curiously often two) viable options. And because the carging port is not the only variable, some people buy the iPhone, despite the inconvenience of presumably less luck in borrowing a charger...
- darkerside 9y ago
  This is a very myopic and short term perspective on the market. Localized inefficiencies like you are talking about certainly exist--and likely always will. Over time, the will be resolved by the market entrance of a third party offering consumers what they really want (defined as, willing to actually pay money for). Then the big players adapt or die.
  - gkya 9y ago
    Even if so, we live in the short term (and, define "short term": minutes, months, years, decades?) and among the inefficiencies localized in most of the possible "locations" if not all of them, and I'd rather have regulation protect me than wait an indefinite amount of time until some good-willing entreprise takes initiative, and then another indefinite amount of time until they are successful, and then another indefinite amount of time the big players adapt or die, a process which when listed like this seems to me to be at most as efficient as wishing upon a star. What "market" is is a big bunch of entities trying to maximise the output and minimise the input (in a large large majority of cases). Everything else is a side effect. In order to impose upon those entities anything, the customer base needs to be diverse enough to include potential opposers to the company's policy, and the number of the opposers who decide to boycott or move away should be large enough that such action significantly affects the company's margins. And that's not so easy to happen, especially if the bad the "big players" are doing does not directly affect the customers (e.g. saying "guns are murderous and destructive" will not affect the gun owners all that much, or "your pesticides kill bees" the pesticide users, no?) and thus the vigilance of the market is triply-restricted: by time it takes to produce effects, by the amount of opposition actors it requires, and by the nature of commerce. Thus, it can not produce timely change, requires and is thus fallible to lots of rhetoric, and is only maybe-efficient in a small set of industries and cases.

akie 9y ago

He was talking about standardizing phone chargers to use (one of the) USB standard ones so you don’t end up with a drawer full of outdated and incompatible chargers.

FranzFerdiNaN 9y ago

No, it was extremely good and cool that the EU told corporations to stick to one standard. The market is terrible in making things convenient for consumers if they want to switch phones, as it doesn't make them money. Same with not creating bee-killing pesticides. The markets created them and never stopped despite them being extremely harmful to the environment. But who cares, under capitalism profits matter above all so let's continue producing them.

SllX 9y ago

Someone chime in and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but here's how I understand the "regulation". The EU decided that having a single standard port to charge a smartphone was a good idea and in the long run, save a little bit of money and a little bit on electronic waste since people would be able to go to any store and purchase for sale 1 Standard Smartphone Charger™ and 1 Standard Smartphone Cable™. Then they conferred their preference to the Smartphone Industry™ and said "Okay, you guys sort it out. Pick a standard, incorporate it going forward, or we will bring down the regulatory hammer and not even we want to do that." At that point USB was proving to be more or less a de facto standard anyway, so the industry said okay, settled on that, and somehow Apple got away with being able to just bundle in an adapter for the Standard Smartphone Cable™. The benefit of this approach rather than the EU swinging the regulatory hammer is it leaves the industry free to update it, say from micro-USB to USB-C, as improvements come along, rather than the EU decreeing that all smartphones use micro-USB which would be Terrible. Thus we have a Standard by Agreement, rather than a Standard by Law and life goes on pretty okay. For good or for ill, the EU has a massive amount of soft power in their lawmaking alone with repercussions that go beyond the 28 (soon to be 27 again) member states. Any smartphone designer is free to take their phone and go home, but that's a lot of money to leave on the table and its not like anybody particularly liked the old crappy connectors of the past.

Symbiote 9y ago
The recommendation is also for the port on the charger, which even on Apple chargers is standard USB-A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply
rbanffy 9y ago
Your description is pretty much on the spot (IIRC) > soon to be 27 again My bet is still on a Norway-like solution, which saves (some) face for the Tories and has minimal consequences. But I am known to be an optimist from time to time.

hn0 9y ago

The regulation was because the companies were NOT competing in the market for phone chargers through vendor lock in. I don’t know about you but I’m glad I no longer have to keep a box with 30 different chargers anymore. More electronics jumped on the USB charging bandwagon and phone recharging stations are suddenly a thing. Apple somehow seems to have escaped the regulation, sadly.

klaushougesen1 9y ago
Apple categorises the iphone as a mini portable compute device - and thereby skirts the whole phone charger thing
detaro 9y ago
Apple's charger is compliant since it has an USB-A port and phone side you can use an adapter, which explicitly was allowed in the deal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_external_power_supply#R...
murjinsee 9y ago
In addition to competition, there were also safety issues with proprietary chargers. I personally experienced this, when I had an emergency and my LG Lotus was dead. I tried using a borrowed microUSB charger at the hospital, only to be presented with the message, "Please use an LG-branded charger." The power rating was identical; but, they had some kind of crazy, DRM-like scheme in place. I'm very glad that I can now use or buy a cable anywhere and use pretty much any block, even an inefficient one.

neuromute 9y ago

USB regulation imposed by the EU is a fantastic idea (in theory, at least). The amount of waste in the form of old proprietary device chargers is quite staggering and it poses an environmental problem. If all devices use USB, then this waste is somewhat reduced. ‘Almost every household is believed to have gathered a number of old chargers – estimated to generate more than 51 000 tons of electronic waste per year in the EU.’ [1] [1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/red-directive/common-charger_en http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/re...

oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
Back when micro-usb was a thing, I accumulated an ungodly number of cables, way more than can be explained by obvious logic such as 'one per device'. At the time it was great because I never seemed to be more than ten feet from the cable I needed. Then came usb-c so I had to start all over, but I kept hold of all the old cables because of some weird hoarding instinct. A few weeks ago, I had to downgrade back from usb-c to micro and I am hugely relieved I kept all those old cables! Moral of the story: never throw out old cables ... (maybe)
- hackbinary 9y ago
  It is now probably safe to dispose of your old mfm and SCSI cables. Probably even your parallel port cables can go as well. ;)

gkya 9y ago

Market tends to decide against the customers when it can. The market isn't the customers anyways, the market is those who live in their billion billion dollar bubbles and their employees. We the customers can not affect the decisions, but can only choose from the handful (curiously often two) viable options. And because the carging port is not the only variable, some people buy the iPhone, despite the inconvenience of presumably less luck in borrowing a charger...

darkerside 9y ago
This is a very myopic and short term perspective on the market. Localized inefficiencies like you are talking about certainly exist--and likely always will. Over time, the will be resolved by the market entrance of a third party offering consumers what they really want (defined as, willing to actually pay money for). Then the big players adapt or die.
- gkya 9y ago
  Even if so, we live in the short term (and, define "short term": minutes, months, years, decades?) and among the inefficiencies localized in most of the possible "locations" if not all of them, and I'd rather have regulation protect me than wait an indefinite amount of time until some good-willing entreprise takes initiative, and then another indefinite amount of time until they are successful, and then another indefinite amount of time the big players adapt or die, a process which when listed like this seems to me to be at most as efficient as wishing upon a star. What "market" is is a big bunch of entities trying to maximise the output and minimise the input (in a large large majority of cases). Everything else is a side effect. In order to impose upon those entities anything, the customer base needs to be diverse enough to include potential opposers to the company's policy, and the number of the opposers who decide to boycott or move away should be large enough that such action significantly affects the company's margins. And that's not so easy to happen, especially if the bad the "big players" are doing does not directly affect the customers (e.g. saying "guns are murderous and destructive" will not affect the gun owners all that much, or "your pesticides kill bees" the pesticide users, no?) and thus the vigilance of the market is triply-restricted: by time it takes to produce effects, by the amount of opposition actors it requires, and by the nature of commerce. Thus, it can not produce timely change, requires and is thus fallible to lots of rhetoric, and is only maybe-efficient in a small set of industries and cases.