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> 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? Becaus

> 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.

transcriptase 6mo ago
[flagged]
- thrownthatway 6mo ago
  [flagged]
eru 6mo ago
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.
- thrownthatway 6mo ago
  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.
  - eru 6mo ago
    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.)
    - thrownthatway 6mo ago
      Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph. I really appreciate it, keep up with the good work. Bloody Clippers. You always got to watch out for the Clippers, they’ll take whatever you say or write and clip it out of context and make it mean something completely different to what you really said. The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
      - Toutouxc 6mo ago
        There’s nothing important in the last paragraph.
      - eru 6mo ago
        > Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph. Eh, you know that people can just scroll up? > The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs. Are you willing to bet on this?
        thrownthatway 6mo ago
        Yeah, sure, $10? $10 says that by 2040 Europe will institute massive concessions to Russia for helping deal with the Islamic Caliphate in Europe. Which wouldn’t have happened if Europe had been paying more attention to stuff that mattered, and less on which charge port people had on their phones.
- clownpenis_fart 6mo ago
  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"?
  - eru 6mo ago
    > 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.
thrownthatway 6mo ago
[flagged]
- gnabgib 6mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
  - mvdtnz 6mo ago
    So?
    - thrownthatway 6mo ago
      It’s a weird comment. Like yeah, Apple helped design the USB-C connector and preferred something else. Thereby only reinforcing my point.
    - da_chicken 6mo ago
      USB-C is rated for 10,000 connections, while Lightning is rated for 40,000. Except if you disconnect and reconnect your phone 4 times a day every day of every year you own it, 10,000 is enough for just under 7 years. And Lighting was introduced in 2012, while USB-C was 2014. In those days, the average lifespan of a smartphone was 2.5 years. Even today, the software is only supported for 7 years at most. You don't need a connector that's going to last nearly 30 years. And the additional durability of Lightning is itself not free. It's not cheaper than USB-C. Quite the opposite. That additional cost means that it either uses more resources to manufacture, or more resources to make the tools to manufacture. So, it's just wasteful. Lightning is "physically superior" but USB-C is better engineering. Apple knows that. So Apple chose to go with Lightning because it was theirs, not because it was better. Because it's not really better. Not better for the customer. Or really better for business. Apple chose vendor lock-in. Worse than that, Apple's connectors are higher durability, but their cabling itself is awful. I work at a K-12 and we were in an iPad and Chromebook pilot back in the mid 2010s that ran about 4-5 years. We had a fleet of 3500 of each. The iPads saw less than half the usage hours as the Chromebooks, but had something like triple the incidence of cable replacement. The cable insulation splits. The plasticizers degrade, the cables get really sticky or oily, and then they split and expose the braided grounding sheath. That braided cable will shock you. That was true for both student and staff devices. So they had these wonderful connectors, but the cables still failed at effectively five or six times the rate of the alternative. And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!
BenFranklin100 6mo ago
With that attitude, we’d still be using D-sub connectors.
- tossaway0 6mo ago
  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.
  - BenFranklin100 6mo ago
    You miss my point. The ‘new standard’ will be settled on by various committees each composed of different people with different priorities including maintaining the status quo. It will take years to potentially decades to settle on any technologically superior alternatives. Design by committee is how Europe works. It’s also a reason Europe moves slower and is less innovative than America.
    - okanat 6mo ago
      Europe is not less innovative. Many advanced machinery that makes everything else originate and get perfected in Europe. EU is way more efficient in making citizen-friendly laws too. The USA just likes to splurge unnecessary amount of money and call that "innovation" where there isn't any. They can do that because they have lots of money and infinite debt limit due to US Dollar's special status. This also makes everything else expensive for other players in the world. Remove the special status and see how the worlds change.
- account42 6mo ago
  D-sub connectors are still pretty common in embedded applications.
jpfromlondon 6mo ago
>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.
- ssl-3 6mo ago
  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.)
- ben_w 6mo ago
  (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.
  - okanat 6mo ago
    (4) Or just as the law states, you can update the regulation accordingly. There are avenues of update just in the law. The connector should be just modern enough. At the same time I do believe thermodynamics itself will be the limit and 120 W is more than enough for any phone.
- lxgr 6mo ago
  > it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector. You know what, I'm absolutely fine with that. I still remember when every single manufacturer had their own shitty 10-30 pin connector that effectively did the exact same thing: Transfer some current, analog audio, and some USB data. It was absolutely not worth the mutual incompatibility (you'd actually have to always carry your own charger and could not borrow one). If some amazing new technology comes around that needs more than 240W charging or 80 Gbit/s data transfer to smartphones and can't be retrofitted into the USB-C form factor, let's take the time to change the law. > if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape You seem to be misremembering how it actually played out: We didn't end up with the EU stranded on some standard, quite the opposite: The EU effectively forced Apple (the last non-negligible non-USB-C holdout) to switch to USB-C globally.

transcriptase 6mo ago

[flagged]

thrownthatway 6mo ago
[flagged]

eru 6mo ago

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.

thrownthatway 6mo ago
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.
- eru 6mo ago
  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.)
  - thrownthatway 6mo ago
    Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph. I really appreciate it, keep up with the good work. Bloody Clippers. You always got to watch out for the Clippers, they’ll take whatever you say or write and clip it out of context and make it mean something completely different to what you really said. The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs.
    - Toutouxc 6mo ago
      There’s nothing important in the last paragraph.
    - eru 6mo ago
      > Thanks for decontextualising that paragraph by not including the following paragraph. Eh, you know that people can just scroll up? > The European Union will fall to Russia while they're looking for a USB-C charge cable that works, or looking for a charged swappable battery for their MANPADs. Are you willing to bet on this?
      - thrownthatway 6mo ago
        Yeah, sure, $10? $10 says that by 2040 Europe will institute massive concessions to Russia for helping deal with the Islamic Caliphate in Europe. Which wouldn’t have happened if Europe had been paying more attention to stuff that mattered, and less on which charge port people had on their phones.
clownpenis_fart 6mo ago
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"?
- eru 6mo ago
  > 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.

thrownthatway 6mo ago

[flagged]

gnabgib 6mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
- mvdtnz 6mo ago
  So?
  - thrownthatway 6mo ago
    It’s a weird comment. Like yeah, Apple helped design the USB-C connector and preferred something else. Thereby only reinforcing my point.
  - da_chicken 6mo ago
    USB-C is rated for 10,000 connections, while Lightning is rated for 40,000. Except if you disconnect and reconnect your phone 4 times a day every day of every year you own it, 10,000 is enough for just under 7 years. And Lighting was introduced in 2012, while USB-C was 2014. In those days, the average lifespan of a smartphone was 2.5 years. Even today, the software is only supported for 7 years at most. You don't need a connector that's going to last nearly 30 years. And the additional durability of Lightning is itself not free. It's not cheaper than USB-C. Quite the opposite. That additional cost means that it either uses more resources to manufacture, or more resources to make the tools to manufacture. So, it's just wasteful. Lightning is "physically superior" but USB-C is better engineering. Apple knows that. So Apple chose to go with Lightning because it was theirs, not because it was better. Because it's not really better. Not better for the customer. Or really better for business. Apple chose vendor lock-in. Worse than that, Apple's connectors are higher durability, but their cabling itself is awful. I work at a K-12 and we were in an iPad and Chromebook pilot back in the mid 2010s that ran about 4-5 years. We had a fleet of 3500 of each. The iPads saw less than half the usage hours as the Chromebooks, but had something like triple the incidence of cable replacement. The cable insulation splits. The plasticizers degrade, the cables get really sticky or oily, and then they split and expose the braided grounding sheath. That braided cable will shock you. That was true for both student and staff devices. So they had these wonderful connectors, but the cables still failed at effectively five or six times the rate of the alternative. And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!

BenFranklin100 6mo ago

With that attitude, we’d still be using D-sub connectors.

tossaway0 6mo ago
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.
- BenFranklin100 6mo ago
  You miss my point. The ‘new standard’ will be settled on by various committees each composed of different people with different priorities including maintaining the status quo. It will take years to potentially decades to settle on any technologically superior alternatives. Design by committee is how Europe works. It’s also a reason Europe moves slower and is less innovative than America.
  - okanat 6mo ago
    Europe is not less innovative. Many advanced machinery that makes everything else originate and get perfected in Europe. EU is way more efficient in making citizen-friendly laws too. The USA just likes to splurge unnecessary amount of money and call that "innovation" where there isn't any. They can do that because they have lots of money and infinite debt limit due to US Dollar's special status. This also makes everything else expensive for other players in the world. Remove the special status and see how the worlds change.
account42 6mo ago
D-sub connectors are still pretty common in embedded applications.

jpfromlondon 6mo ago

>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.

ssl-3 6mo ago
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.)
ben_w 6mo ago
(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.
- okanat 6mo ago
  (4) Or just as the law states, you can update the regulation accordingly. There are avenues of update just in the law. The connector should be just modern enough. At the same time I do believe thermodynamics itself will be the limit and 120 W is more than enough for any phone.
lxgr 6mo ago
> it hampers innovation inside the bloc people who might otherwise be concocting their own improved connector. You know what, I'm absolutely fine with that. I still remember when every single manufacturer had their own shitty 10-30 pin connector that effectively did the exact same thing: Transfer some current, analog audio, and some USB data. It was absolutely not worth the mutual incompatibility (you'd actually have to always carry your own charger and could not borrow one). If some amazing new technology comes around that needs more than 240W charging or 80 Gbit/s data transfer to smartphones and can't be retrofitted into the USB-C form factor, let's take the time to change the law. > if anyone invents a significantly better connector the eu will lag a decade while they clear the red tape You seem to be misremembering how it actually played out: We didn't end up with the EU stranded on some standard, quite the opposite: The EU effectively forced Apple (the last non-negligible non-USB-C holdout) to switch to USB-C globally.