[mschuster91]

> But that might put the EU at an economic disadvantage; it's hubris to believe the rest of the world will bend backwards to meet EU's rules.

Actually, it will. RoHS and the push for standardizing phone connectors ended up influencing the whole world and making it a better place for everyone.

The EU is a sizable market, and unlike the US with its constant elections and government shutdowns, it's politically relatively stable. No one, as said not even Apple, can ignore the demands of the European Union.

[eru]

> [...] the push for standardizing phone connectors ended up [...] making it a better place for everyone.

What's your evidence for that?

By default, we should assume that the engineers building phones and the consumers buying phones are the best placed to evaluate what connectors they want. And it would take considerable evidence to convince us that some unrelated third party bureaucrats know better.

Especially since even the best case benefits are so minuscule: it's already very easy to get charging cables that have multiple heads, for that people that own multiple phones with different connectors, but only want a single cable. (And everyone else can just buy one cable or the other.)

[mschuster91]

> What's your evidence for that?

Living in a world where I don't have a host of different power bricks in my travel bag any more, where one single Anker dual-port charger is enough to bring with me on vacation and get my stuff charged, and where when I lose my cable I can just walk into any random store and buy one for cheap.

> it's already very easy to get charging cables that have multiple heads, for that people that own multiple phones with different connectors

These multi-head cables almost all don't pass through the D+/D- pins of USB which means no way to get more than 500 mA charging current from them.

[eru]

> Living in a world where I don't have a host of different power bricks in my travel bag any more, [...]

Huh? I don't have to do that, either. I only have different cables, but the power brick is the same.

[mschuster91]

Yeah because by now it's all USB. I'm old enough to 'member the times where literally everyone had different plugs and voltages.

[eru]

Yes, but that standardisation on USB that we have already witnessed came about without any legal mandates, or did it? So it undermines the argument for them.

[mschuster91]

> Yes, but that standardisation on USB that we have already witnessed came about without any legal mandates, or did it?

The EU said "hey guys, make up your mind on a standard" to the industry at large, which led to the consolidation to Mini-USB and, later on, Micro-USB, and as Apple hadn't even moved an inch towards standardization and USB-C was validated enough to be supporting literally everything, the EU said "okay, Apple doesn't want to listen, so we bring down the hammer".

[toyg]

Standardization was an option, but it took laws to actually force the inevitable refuseniks (like Apple) to the table.

[scarby2]

The EU has consent elections, it's just a proportional representation forces people to work together to get anything done, so you end up with a lot of relatively uncontroversial work happening. There's also little point in trying to score points as you will never have a majority

[mschuster91]

> The EU has consent elections

The EU parliament is elected every five years, and while most of the member countries elect during the EU parliament term and so it's election year somewhere in the EU every year, national elections usually have negligible impact on the European level (outside of dramatic swings like in Poland or Slovakia between dedicated notorious pro-EU and anti-EU parties).

In contrast, the US re-elects the whole House and 1/3rd of the Senate every two years which means that the House is basically only at peace to work for a year at a time (first half year is spent on getting the newbies up to speed, last half year is filled with campaigning), and if changing control over the Senate is even possible depends on if the states whose seats are up for reelection are considered swing states or not. The entire way the US Congress works is not incentivizing bipartisan legislation, and it's outright hostile to the idea that there could be more than two political parties.