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by mgraczyk 1352 days ago
Serious question, why is is it a problem to put a tiny cable in a landfill? The amount they leach is essentially zero. The EU would have done more for the environment by spending $20k cleaning up an extra few car batteries. This is so obviously pandering and protectionism and it's surprising to me people believe the "e-waste" justification.

Seriously, is there an accounting of the environmental damage caused by cell phone cables (not power converters)? Everything I've seen points to the damage being substantially less globally than a single digit number of cars or batteries.
1 comments
crote 1352 days ago
The problem is that it is a lot of tiny cables, and a lot of chargers with them.

Additionally, it also protects the consumer by preventing companies from locking consumers into buying device-specific chargers at greatly inflated prices. It might even become common for devices to come without chargers: why have 10 chargers lying around when all your devices use the same charging connector?

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mgraczyk 1352 days ago
But no, this is not true. The iphone charger is already USB. I use them with my Android phone all the time, and iphone users charge with my pixel charger. Those already interoperate.

I understand the e-waste and consumer protection argument for the charger (power converter), but why the cable?

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crote 1352 days ago
This isn't really the case in practice, though.

Up until recently everyone used USB-A on the charger end, with a dozen different competing fast charge protocols. Chargers had the same connector, but they weren't fully interoperable. USB-C is slowly trying to fix this.

I completely agree that the cables aren't a massive deal. But on the other hand, if you are already standardizing chargers, why not do the cables too? Personally, I see no overwhelmingly good reason not to do it.

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mgraczyk 1352 days ago
Because the connectors still suck and there's a ton of room for innovation. Imagine if we were stuck with USB-C forever, that would be bad. It's already worse than lightning as a connector for cell phones.

The default shouldn't be to place arbitrary restrictions unless there's a good reason not to. Governments should restrict behavior when the restriction is justified. It should be the EU government's responsibility to demonstrate that banning lightning cables is good, not the other way around.

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int_19h 1352 days ago
How exactly is it worse that Lightning?
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HWR_14 1352 days ago
iPhones already come with a USB-C -> Lightning cable. They already don't come with chargers.
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