[nickpp]

The free market was doing just fine, thank you very much. It converged by itself into two pretty good standards (none of the previously EU-recommended micro-USB abomination) - one private one open but each having a big enough market to make sure there was very little of that much-pretended "waste". On the contrary - the e-waste next year when millions of Apple users have to throw away perfectly fine cables and charges will be absolutely gigantic.

Apple will have no problem complying as they already had a separate European nano SIM model. Or maybe they were ready to switch to USB-C anyway (a standard they helped develop), as they did with iPad Pros and MacBooks. While us users will swallow the cost as always while bitching about downgrading to USB-C.

But now innovation in this domain was made illegal. There is no way a company will invest in researching a new connector when they cannot legally bring it to the market. So Europe is becoming dependent on American creativity in yet another area. A small and maybe negligible one, of course, but this is a symptom of a larger disease: the EU is voting to mandate stagnation. And the worst part when outlawing innovation is this: you don't even know what you are missing. Because nobody is allowed to invent that future anymore.