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by Forgeties79 4 days ago
No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either. Ultimately it’s about the weight you can throw as well as PR. Probably easier for Apple to make the EU look bad and drag their feet on it. I imagine they’re still not thrilled about the Lightening->USB-C change
2 comments
JumpCrisscross 4 days ago
> No one complains (out loud) about US regulations either

Everyone constantly does!

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nkozyra 4 days ago
> Everyone constantly does!

In the aggregate, I agree, but in tech things are pretty loose outside of California.

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Forgeties79 4 days ago
The same way they constantly do and don’t about the Chinese government I’d say.
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stouset 4 days ago
Apple was literally the first major company to go all-in on USB-C. They shipped entire devices that only had USB-C ports.

If anything, I would wager they were happy about it. They were going to have to do it anyway, and it would inevitably cause friction for users who were already invested in Lightning cables and third-party devices. The EU forcing this just meant they could shift the blame for any negative sentiment onto the EU.

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Forgeties79 3 days ago
They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.

Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.

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stouset 3 days ago
We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.

If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.

When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.

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