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I don't understand how you can think this is needed in the slightest unless you literally can't make a decision yourself. I'm sorry but you can buy a USB cable

I don't understand how you can think this is needed in the slightest unless you literally can't make a decision yourself. I'm sorry but you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. This just simply isn't a problem, it's not a quality of life issue. It's just not. Buy cables with breakout mini, c, and tbunderbolt for 5$. Solved. This type of regulation will kill the west. The amount of money and waste it cost to create this regulation will far exceed any value it ever adds in terms of measurable productivity. Not to mention that innovation is killed with this type of approach... USB standards change for reasons.. But hey I'm glad you can borrow 100% of all of your friends cables to charge your phone rather than 90% today.... ️

thomasahle 7y ago
> you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations. I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.
- vineyardmike 7y ago
  Sounds like every other phone should actually switch to lightning to solve your mini jack issue. The prevalence of iPhone-ready cables proves that the ubiquity of iPhone cables is adequate- maybe even better than USB C in some markets.
  - dijit 7y ago
    But it has a patent which does not allow unlimited use. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en Also; iPhone domination is not nearly as prevalent outside of the US.
- georgebarnett 7y ago
  .. so it’s Apples fault that Android phone makers can’t produce a credible USB-C headphone adapter? Wow. That’s some seriously backwards logic.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- ksec 7y ago
  >And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. Um... No. It has nothing to do with that EU standardisation. The USB converged on all Android SmartPhone was because it was cheap, and it transfer Data fairly fast. Which was the De-Facto Standard on PC.
seszett 7y ago
I'm not sure you understand how the situation was before manufacturers standardised on micro USB. Back then, you usually had zero chance of finding a compatible cable with your phone unless your went to a specialized store. Different models by the same manufacturer had different cables, even different versions of the same model often had different cables as well.
- defnotashton2 7y ago
  Was there industry standardized naturally, the problem was solved...
dijit 7y ago
I don’t mean to imply that you’re young, but to say what you just said implies that you didn’t live the life of mobile phones pre-2004 (when the EU charging directive came in). Not only was every phone manufacturer having their own charger, often they would have different charging ports between models or product categories within the same brand! The landscape you’re describing now exists precisely because of this directive. And manufacturers can evolve to new chargers (like USB-C instead of micro-b, we saw this happen) it’s just that manufacturers have to agree amongst themselves.
- thu2111 7y ago
  No it doesn't. The industry was developing USB and standardized it for power before the EU Commission started caring about this. What happened would have happened anyway due to economies of scale.
  - dijit 7y ago
    Development of a standard does not nearly equate to deployment of a standard. There are open standards for instant communication. How many proprietary protocols and implementations exist? How many are so widely adopted? Contrast that with open ones. There’s quite a lot of money in peripherals; it’s also a neat way of obsoleting older phones. Broken custom chargers were usually the reason I stopped using a phone; meaning I bought a new one.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother developing their own proprietary charging and cable standards, and as they proved, the regulation is toothless: they simply shipped a cheap adapter nobody cared about or used and that was the regulation solved. I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work. As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea. Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.

thomasahle 7y ago

> you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations. I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.

vineyardmike 7y ago
Sounds like every other phone should actually switch to lightning to solve your mini jack issue. The prevalence of iPhone-ready cables proves that the ubiquity of iPhone cables is adequate- maybe even better than USB C in some markets.
- dijit 7y ago
  But it has a patent which does not allow unlimited use. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en Also; iPhone domination is not nearly as prevalent outside of the US.
georgebarnett 7y ago
.. so it’s Apples fault that Android phone makers can’t produce a credible USB-C headphone adapter? Wow. That’s some seriously backwards logic.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ksec 7y ago
>And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. Um... No. It has nothing to do with that EU standardisation. The USB converged on all Android SmartPhone was because it was cheap, and it transfer Data fairly fast. Which was the De-Facto Standard on PC.

seszett 7y ago

I'm not sure you understand how the situation was before manufacturers standardised on micro USB. Back then, you usually had zero chance of finding a compatible cable with your phone unless your went to a specialized store. Different models by the same manufacturer had different cables, even different versions of the same model often had different cables as well.

defnotashton2 7y ago
Was there industry standardized naturally, the problem was solved...

dijit 7y ago

I don’t mean to imply that you’re young, but to say what you just said implies that you didn’t live the life of mobile phones pre-2004 (when the EU charging directive came in). Not only was every phone manufacturer having their own charger, often they would have different charging ports between models or product categories within the same brand! The landscape you’re describing now exists precisely because of this directive. And manufacturers can evolve to new chargers (like USB-C instead of micro-b, we saw this happen) it’s just that manufacturers have to agree amongst themselves.

thu2111 7y ago
No it doesn't. The industry was developing USB and standardized it for power before the EU Commission started caring about this. What happened would have happened anyway due to economies of scale.
- dijit 7y ago
  Development of a standard does not nearly equate to deployment of a standard. There are open standards for instant communication. How many proprietary protocols and implementations exist? How many are so widely adopted? Contrast that with open ones. There’s quite a lot of money in peripherals; it’s also a neat way of obsoleting older phones. Broken custom chargers were usually the reason I stopped using a phone; meaning I bought a new one.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Deployment of USB was happening anyway. I don't understand this belief that the Commission has anything to do with USB adoption. It predates the Commissions's involvement by a long way, USB was developed completely independently and the vast majority of consumer electronics firms see no competitive advantage in making their own chargers/cables so standardisation was the direction of travel anyway. Only Apple bother developing their own proprietary charging and cable standards, and as they proved, the regulation is toothless: they simply shipped a cheap adapter nobody cared about or used and that was the regulation solved. I think there's a lot of backwards reasoning here. Lots of people want to believe the EU is good, therefore, if it does something, it must be good. This kind of nitpicky regulation is worthless: if there had been genuine, fierce competition over cable systems the EU would never have dared to regulate in the first place. It was only because the industry was standardising anyway that they were able to pass such a rule, and take credit for other people's engineering work. As for open vs closed communication standards, that's a red herring. Lots of firms have had unusual ideas about how to advance consumer communications, which is why we mostly use their products (with the obvious and major exceptions of the web and email). But in charging standards and many other areas people realised their efforts were best pooled. Government had no impact on these decisions but can certainly now impede innovations if someone does come up with some revolutionary new cable idea. Look at it this way. If this regulation had applied to computers pre-Steve Jobs we might never have seen MagSafe cables. They'd have been literally illegal which is insane. The EU is way out of bounds here. It's the sort of thing that supported the case of Brexit - celebrated last night.