[throwaway50606]

How do you know how to change the laws if nobody is allowed to try different things (thus innovate)? USB-C didn't come from nowhere, and it wasn't a given that it's better than MicroUSB - first the market tested it, then it became a standard.

EU laws have worldwide effects, there's no land of cable freedom anymore.

[vidarh]

You're free to try other things. You're just not free to leave out a USB-C plug as long as that is the standard, and you will run into trouble if you try to play stupid games with adding power delivery profiles to your USB-C support that try to circumvent the goal of these regulations of removing device-specific cables or chargers.

If Apple "only" ends up offering a certification mark for USB-C chargers that have been tested with the iPhone and makes that easily accessible, they might well be in the clear. If they try to add power delivery profiles that are unavailable to everyone else, chances are the EU will react.

[mrtksn]

EU laws don't expand beyond EU. EU consist about 5% of the population, 95% can have whatever they like. Yes, there's Brussels effect but that effect work when the trouble of designing or producing something else is not worth it.

Also, you are not banned from engineering other solutions. The police isn't going to knock on the doors of engineers who are suspected to develop better charging cables :)

[throwaway50606]

EU is the second largest market in the world. Of course everything is going to be made in a way that's sellable in the EU.

> Also, you are not banned from engineering other solutions. The police isn't going to knock on the doors of engineers who are suspected to develop better charging cables :)

We are discussing under an article where the regulator has sent a "stern warning" to a company. I don't think what you're saying makes sense. If I tried to sell my better plug in my home market, the police would come knocking.

[ghaff]

You mean like how EU-compatible AC plugs/voltages are sold everywhere else in the world? Of course, manufacturers can have different versions of things for different geos--or just not sell in the EU if it's not profitable to do so (which presumably won't be the case with the iPhone).

[throwaway50606]

EU exists 10% of the time the electrical plugs existed and were regulated in the respective countries.

We are talking about new innovations, not something used for 100 years.

[anigbrowl]

No they wouldn't, because you are not a giant corporation like Apple. Stop assuming your scrappy little startup and a trillion-$ corporation with massive market share have similar interests, this is like an ant worrying about a fence designed to block elephants.

In reality if you come up with some kind of better plug, you will sell to a specialist market that would recognize the benefits (dentists or musicians for example) and then expand into other markets. You could try selling direct to consumers but guess what, nobody would buy it unless it had connectivity with other devices, and manufacturers wouldn't go out of their way to adopt it unless it delivered overwhelming advantages at low additional cost.

[mrtksn]

Not necessarily. If you come up with such a superior plug, you can easily have it sold on the 1st largest market in the world.

Not everything has to be sold in EU, there are plenty of things not available across all markets.

[throwaway50606]

No, I can't. I need to sell it on both markets to make it profitable. There's no way to have that large margins it could sell just in the US.

[mrtksn]

If you need to sell it on both markets and can't have two production lines, I guess your product will have USB-C port and your superior charging port, like the new MacBooks having type-C and magsafe.

[throwaway50606]

And that's supposed to be good? I really don't understand this world...

[anigbrowl]

IF you can't be profitable at anything other than global scale, maybe your (wholly hypothetical) invention is not that great.

[nickpp]

There are now zero incentives to research and develop better plugs in the EU since it is illegal to market devices sporting them instead of USB-C.

[mrtksn]

The rest of the world can develop the superior charging cable plugs and we can use this thing called internet to find out about it.

[nickpp]

Depending on the rest of the world for tech, research and innovation is why us, Europeans, are worried about these authoritarian EU mandates which can only cause us falling further behind the rest of the world.

[mrtksn]

Can you give me an example of an EU regulation which prevented an European company invent a technology?

I'm familiar with the narrative but I don't know any examples.

[throwaway50606]

Gaia-X funneled money to large corporations that used it to market their shitty corporate services and that allowed them to beat actually innovative cloud computing startups.

[nickpp]

By definition, we cannot know the creations and innovations we are missing due to the unintended second-order freezing effects of regulation. This is why we need to be extremely skeptical of regulation and only accept it in truly important and non-trivial cases (unlike a damn charging plug).

There is a clear push from European elites for a halt in progress, aiming to maintain a status quo and preserve their existing advantages. Modern corporation not under their control threaten them. As progressives, it is crucial that we fight to ensure that Europe continues to advance instead of turning into an Amish village and we won't have all to emigrate to the US.

[Moldoteck]

Wtf are you smoking? You can add other ports, the law is about mandating usb-c. If you want thunderlightening port or anything you want besides usbc, like HEADPHONE JACK, you can doo this...

[nickpp]

How many phones have you seen with multiple different ports for the exact same purpose: charging?

[Moldoteck]

I can name a few but why does this matter. The point is Apple can work around this for eu market if they want but at the end consumers will win anyway

[nickpp]

I'm a consumer and I lost: I'll have to change all my charging cables with an inferior alternative.

[TheCleric]

I mean Apple currently has two...

[viraptor]

Apart from all the existing answers - usb-c did not come to the phones first either. It was available and tested in many other places first. And it makes sense, because if we ever need over 40Gbps of data, or over 200W power, it's extremely unlikely we'll need it for the phones.

[cwillu]

Like quantity, ubiquity has a quality of its own.