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EU Gives Final Approval to Law That Will Force iPhone to Switch to USB-C
- Proven 4y ago
- retrocryptid 4y ago[flagged]
- MisterSandman 4y agoJust curious, what happens when USB C gets outdated and needs to be replaced?
- jagger27 4y ago120Gbps ought to be enough for anyone.
- olliej 4y agoIt doesn't. Just ask South Korea how their IE law went :-/
- robin_reala 4y agoThat’s a different situation. They didn’t have an IE law: they had a specific requirement for secure transactions. At the time the US was banning export of anything over 40-bit, so they had to come up with their own standard: SEED. They produced IE and NN4 plug-ins, but NN4 died off and then inertia kept every site in the country on the national encryption standard that no other browsers supported. (Firefox does attempt to support it, but websites tend to assume IE and ActiveX regardless.) In this case the EU has aligned with an existing industry standard, and has said that they expect the standard to develop over time.
- Dylan16807 4y agoDo you think that's going to happen in the next 20 years?
- jonas21 4y agoUSB-Mini and Micro were both obsolete within 20 years.
- jagger27 4y agoType-A isn’t though.
- Dylan16807 4y agoWhile true, that is not an answer to my question. C has a lot more going for it on the longevity front.
- arcticbull 4y agoOn the other hand USB-A has been going strong since 1996, just shy of 27 years now.
- diebeforei485 4y agoIn practice plenty of things are being sold with Micro or in some cases even Mini. Bicycle headlights are an example. You could be spending $150+ and still have very few options for a USB-C headlight.
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoThis law does not carve the USB-C into stone. There is a review mechanism and a mechanism for monitoring the market and approving another port in the future when it's time to do so. This is done through the USB Implementers Forum. All this law really, truly does is force manufacturers to sit around a table and work out a single solution for the whole electronics market. EU doesn't really care about USB-C or USB-D or USB-Whatever, they just require industry to set aside pettiness and work out a solution.
- diebeforei485 4y agoThat's a bit strange. The USB Implementers Forum people are partly why we're in this mess. What if someone comes up with something just better, and doesn't want to deal with the cruft and backward compatibility requirements of USB?
- Dylan16807 4y agoFor charging, the spec is tiny. For slow to medium data, USB 2.0 is baked in to so many chips that it's hard to imagine wanting anything else. For fast data, maybe you want a new port in some situations, but does that also have to be your only charging port?
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago> For charging, the spec is tiny. Have you ever looked at the horror that is USB-PD? The reason you've never seen v1 devices in the real world is because the spec was impossible to implement so they had to fix it in a v2.
- Dylan16807 4y agoI'm aware it vastly changed between 1 and 2, but I'm talking about using the current version, the fixed one. "Tiny" probably isn't the best word but it's straightforward enough. It can be put into tiny chips.
- Hamuko 4y agoProbably won't happen that quickly with phones. People don't really need that much data transfer speed with their phones, and we already have the technology to push 80 Gb/s via USB-C. Apple has gotten by by selling sub-0.5 Gb/s for a decade. And I'd expect us to hit a couple more speed records still before we actually outgrow the physical USB-C connector. We're also pushing up to 240 watts through the USB-C connector, so the charging side (the one that people care much more about) also seems fine for the USB-C connector.
- sneak 4y agoI think Apple’s response will be to go port-free, like the Apple Watch. The eSIM move was one of the last steps.
- transpute 4y agoWireless is not secure, while wired cables offer higher bandwidth and reliability. USB-C enables a range of peripherals, including storage, networking, video or even keyboards via docks which are now ubiquitous. Why cripple a beautiful phone by limiting its connectivity?
- Dylan16807 4y agoApple super doesn't care about data transfer rates for phones. They put USB 2.0 into them. And wireless is secure if you do it right.
- transpute 4y ago> wireless is secure if you do it right. WiFi and bluetooth basebands and drivers have been repeatedly compromised, via public and non-public exploits. WPA3, despite promises of security improvements, remains vulnerable to deauth attacks. 5G LTE, despite promises of tower authentication improvements, remains vulnerable to IMSI catchers. Oct 2022, Over-the-Air remotely exploitable Linux WiFi vulnerabilities (5 CVEs), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33200171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33200171 July 2021, iOS WiFi RCE 0-day vuln, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27868487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27868487 May 2021, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121918 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121918 & https://www.fragattacks.com/ https://www.fragattacks.com/ > FragAttacks (fragmentation and aggregation attacks) ... is a collection of new security vulnerabilities that affect Wi-Fi devices. An adversary that is within range of a victim's Wi-Fi network can abuse these vulnerabilities to steal user information or attack devices. Three of the discovered vulnerabilities are design flaws in the Wi-Fi standard and therefore affect most devices. On top of this, several other vulnerabilities were discovered that are caused by widespread programming mistakes in Wi-Fi products. Experiments indicate that every Wi-Fi product is affected by at least one vulnerability and that most products are affected by several vulnerabilities. July 2017, Broadpwn bug affects millions of Android and iOS devices, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14727400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14727400
- charliea0 4y agoI’m pretty skeptical lawmakers are the best ones to make technical decisions like this.
- iancmceachern 4y agoIt's not really a technical decision.
- arcticbull 4y agoClearly Apple wasn't making the leap, so I'm ok with them getting a shove.
- olliej 4y agoSo to be clear your belief is that Apple should have shipped micro-usb instead of lightning? Or is your belief that Apple should aggressively make users replace all their accessories?
- foepys 4y agoThere was never a law demanding Micro-USB. The availability of USB-C phones for 5+ years should be be proof enough. The previous iteration of the law in the OP only encouraged the industry to get together and make a decision to use a single connector. This didn't happen because Apple just refused to participate and now the lawmakers are sick of it and stepped it up.
- olliej 4y ago> This didn't happen because Apple just refused to participate and now the lawmakers are sick of it and stepped it up. Apple had a huge number of existing users, with existing accessories, before usb-c was even standardized, let alone before it was available in quantity. Look at how people complained about apple dropping the 30pin connector, and replacing it with something superior in every single way - how do you think that would have gone? Hell when the usb-c macbooks started coming out people complained incessantly about no one having usb-c. This bizarre belief that there is absolutely no reason to not have switched to usb-c is annoying BS - there is very clearly a tradeoff, and Apple didn't think it was worth it. I'm going with what others in the thread have said, and expect any plug at all to disappear. Although then it sounds like Brazil will have a shit fit about that instead.
- olliej 4y agoI'm unsure how this helps prevent e-waste, all it seems guaranteed to do is ensure that any existing lightning accessories need to be replaced. If this legislation was 10 years earlier everything in the EU would be using micro/mini-usb today - and usb-c would not be an option without new legislation.
- EMIRELADERO 4y agoThe law doesn't specify USB-C. It just says that the big players need to sit together at a table and set one standard for all. There's a mandatory time period in which they will have to do it again, and the cycle will continue.
- junofan 4y agoThat’s way too sensible. I’m fairly certain that’s how the old law worked, not this one.
- Dylan16807 4y agoIt wasn't how things already worked or Apple would have stopped using lightning.
- tiku 4y agoI wonder how they will avoid it. Perhaps name their device a Personal Digital Assistent? It's easy to make a phone "virtual" inside the device nowadays.
- ls15 4y agoThat would just push the EU to regulate harder.
- kaba0 4y agoWhy would they want to avoid it in the first place? My theory is that they just want to wait for the legislation so that this very minor change that may upset part of the userbase can be blamed on the EU squarely, and they are okay either way (nigh every other device they manufacture are using usb-c)
- wmf 4y agoDidn't EU have a regulation requiring Micro-USB and Apple complied by shipping a Micro-USB to Lightning dongle? Can Apple just ship a USB-C to Lightning dongle now?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Hamuko 4y agoNo dongles this time around.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- warbler73 4y agoI really dislike USB-C, they have failed at a higher rate than previous USB connector styles.
- wildzzz 4y agoAnecdotally, I've never had a type C connector permanently fail on me. Nearly all of my micro-USB phones have been so damaged they refuse to charge without putting a bunch of stress on the connector in a specific direction. Even other micro-USB device sive had fail easily. My type C devices have held up well. Although I do like the lightning connector more, I honestly cannot explain why the cables always seem to be much worse quality.
- midoridensha 4y agoI always liked miniUSB connectors; they seemed pretty rugged despite having a small size. microUSB seemed like a step backwards; it was smaller (mainly thinner), but much more delicate. USB-C seems to be significantly more durable than microUSB, and it can handle a really impressive amount of power.
- rasz 4y agoYou are talking socket mounting durability.
- rasz 4y ago5 vs 24 pins and they are still more durable. How are you destroying your cables?
- btbuilder 4y agoDevelopment and implementation of the 2G GSM standard by the ETSI gave us the global uniformity of mobile networks we still enjoy today. Cross network messaging and international roaming were solved problems in europe years before the US due to this kind of standardization.
- viraptor 4y agoWhat I wonder about is whether USB-C on the phones will now get any upgrade with regards to power output. There's a few devices which don't do USB-C due to available power - for example portable ultrasound scanners.
- sohkamyung 4y agoOff-topic humour. I suppose the company could release a phone with a really huge battery, so you never need to charge it over any connector [1] :-) [1] https://xkcd.com/2680/ https://xkcd.com/2680/
- roenxi 4y agoIt is quite stunning to me that there is such enthusiasm for EU bureaucrats to be making design phones on behalf of Apple. And on top of that, not in any of the interesting areas of the phone but in the charging standard. This type of thinking is why the EU got taken out of the phone manufacturing scene back in 2007. We want and need companies that try to, dare I say, Think Differently than their competition. It is foolish and hindsight is probably going to make the EU look really bad. Their policies have a track record of near total failure in the phone electronics space. They couldn't even keep ARM CPUs in the EU. Their industry leaders failed to lead this industry. They should let more competent companies lead, not force their way in to the design process via law.
- Doxin 4y agoSo what actually happened here is a long time ago, every model of phone had its own proprietary charger. This obviously produces a lot of E-waste. The EU stepped in and warned manufacturers to pick a standard or they would. Basically every brand standardized on micro-usb, and later on USB-C. Every big brand except apple. The EU is now simply making good on their threat. Everyone is playing ball except apple. They aren't special. They aren't unique. They have to play by the rules like anyone else.
- roenxi 4y ago> Everyone is playing ball except apple. They aren't special. They aren't unique. They have to play by the rules like anyone else. Legislating this way means that the EU won't produce any companies that are special. They won't produce companies that are unique. They will play by the rules and get crushed by the Asians and Americans, who will take turns passing the baton of success between the two continents. And I look forward to coming back in a few years to see what impact this has on e-waste. I bet no detectable change. People will still throw out the same number of chargers as ever.
- raspyberr 4y ago>Legislating this way means that the EU won't produce any companies that are special That's a pretty big leap from use USB-C like everyone else. Are you saying that now that Apple has to use USB-C there is no more innovation let for them to do? Were people really buying their products just because of thunderbolt?
- raspyberr 4y agoSpeaking of one charging port being different to everyone else? Does anyone know why, in the UK, shaving sockets are 2 pronged whilst every other socket in a house is 3 pronged?
- mgarstecki 4y agoI think it's because you're only meant to plug shavers there, which are designed to work in humid environments. Other equipments should not be plugged into those sockets, so the physical design prevents it.
- dns_snek 4y agoIt has less to do with humid environments and more to do with grounding in general. You can find 3-pin outlets in most bathrooms in Europe, they're typically used for hair dryers and washing machines. If equipment is designed with sufficient insulation that prevents users from coming in contact with the mains voltage in cause of malfunction, 2 pins are generally enough. Otherwise any electrically conductive parts need to have a connection to ground through the 3rd pin to prevent risk of electric shock.
- btbuilder 4y agoI would think it's because of the different current specifications. In the UK most electrical outlets are on ring circuits that are limited to 32A - that's a whopping 7.5kW. Fuses in the plugs of specific appliances provide additional protection with 13A being the largest (3kW) required. Bathroom outlets are required to have a separate transformer that isolates ground. This prevents the possibility of any electric shock from a short to earth. The current the isolated transformer provides is limited so connecting a regular appliance cannot be allowed.
- taylodl 4y agoYawn. Apple retired the 30 pin connector 10 years ago to much user griping. Apple said then they'd keep the new connector for 10 years. Guess what? It's 10 years later. Meanwhile, Apple has been employing USB-C in more and more of their devices. It's not like they've been avoiding it. All the EU has done is ensured Apple won't keep the Lightning connector longer than the 10 years Apple promised.
- karmakaze 4y agoFor everyone wondering what Apple had to gain from Lightning connector, they collect licensing fees, as well as prefer other Apple devices.