Tuesday, June 7, 2022 9:35 amTuesday, June 7, 202215 Comments

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European Union lawmakers have reached an agreement on legislation that will force all phones sold in the EU to be equipped with the USB-C port for wired charging by fall 2024.

Jon Porter and James Vincent for The Verge:

The rule will also apply to other electronic devices including tablets, digital cameras, headphones, handheld video game consoles, and e-readers. Laptops will have to comply with the rule at a later date.

The legislation has been under development for more than a decade, but an agreement on its scope was reached this morning following negotiations between different EU bodies.

“Today we have made the common charger a reality in Europe!” said the European Parliament’s rapporteur Alex Agius Saliba in a press statement.

The legislation still needs to be approved by the EU Parliament and Council later this year, but this appears to be a formality. In a press release, the European Parliament stated clearly that the law will be in place “by autumn 2024.”

When asked during a press conference if the EU was specifically targeting Apple, Thierry Breton, commissioner for the EU’s internal market, said this was not the case. “The rule applies to all and sundry. It’s not adopted against anybody,” said Breton. “We’re working for the consumers, not the companies, and we have to give these companies rules; rules that are clear in order to enter the internal market.”

Rapporteur Saliba added: “In two years’ time, if Apple wants to sell their products within our internal market they have to abide by our rules, and their device will have to be USB-C.”

However, the EU’s press release says the new legislation applies to devices “that are rechargeable via a wired cable.” This means that Apple may be able to avoid adding USB-C to its devices by creating a phone that only charges wirelessly…

MacDailyNews Take: Again, any government — or, in this case, an extra-national quasi-government-ish body — that mandates technology will stifle innovation. It is a mistake. Luckily, in this case, it won’t matter much. Apple’s iPhones are moving to port-less and, if there is some overlap with USB-C iPhones for a few years, the e-waste created will be minimized.

This isn’t a matter of Lightning vs. USB-C. The problem is the mandating of a certain standard and the innovation it squelches. Idiot bureaucrats never seem to consider unintended consequences, regardless of how obvious they are. This is, as usual, a “sounds great, oh, wait” mistake. (They never seem to be able to even imagine much less consider and weight the “oh, wait” part.)

If you believe the EU will move quickly all of a sudden (it took them over a decade to (almost, not even quite done yet) codify this mistake), as quickly as a tech company like Apple to keep on top of innovation, you’re either a rube or under the age of eight.

USB-C is the wired port now, at least in the EU (and therefore everywhere; nobody is going to make specific devices for the EU which comprises a whopping 5.8% of the world population), pretty much forever.

Big government, quasi or not, is slow and wedded to its own red tape. If something markedly better were to come along, the EU will not magically change their mandate. In fact, what’s the incentive to create a better port than USB-C now? Not only do you have to coax adoption from tech companies as usual, but you’re now also tasked with nightmare and expense of lobbying and convincing a raft of EU bureaucrats to expeditiously agree to change their USB-C mandate.

Forget innovation in wired connectivity. It’s now dead.

Don’t believe? Watch and see. “iCal” us.

This is just needless, slow-as-molasses, bureaucratic meddling in the market; a stick in the spokes that, in the end, will be like mandating a buggy whip with every cart sold, twenty years after the advent of the automobile.

If the EU had passed such a law when this innovation-stifling foolishness was initially proposed, we’d all still be stuck with MicroUSB today!

Regardless,soon Apple’s iPhones won’t have any ports at all. As it stands even today, the Lightning port on our iPhones is a largely superfluous liquid and dust ingress point. If anything, this misguided, shortsighted EU move only hastens Apple’s move to port-free iPhones featuring even better water and dust resistance. – MacDailyNews, June 3, 2022

Years ago, in January 2018, Apple provided feedback on this issue to the European Commission:

Apple stands for innovation. Regulations that would drive conformity across the type of connector built into all smartphones freeze innovation rather than encourage it. Such proposals are bad for the environment and unnecessarily disruptive for customers.

More than 1 billion Apple devices have shipped using a Lightning connector in addition to an entire ecosystem of accessory and device manufacturers who use Lightning to serve our collective customers. We want to ensure that any new legislation will not result in the shipment of any unnecessary cables or external adaptors with every device, or render obsolete the devices and accessories used by many millions of Europeans and hundreds of millions of Apple customers worldwide. This would result in an unprecedented volume of electronic waste and greatly inconvenience users. To be forced to disrupt this huge market of customers will have consequences far beyond the stated aims of the Commission.

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