Thanks for taking the time to respond to many of dilbert99's posts. If you read closely, they are mostly emotional based arguments where the ends justify the means. There are numerous options on the market for people to chose. If Apple's decision to maintain Lightning is that much of a negative, then dilbert99 has the freedom and liberty to make an alternate choice for him/herself. If enough people feel the same way, it will take care of itself. Forcing that preference on the market is damaging in ways that might be unseen at this time and may never be revealed. I only wish people understood just how powerful true freedom to chose is. Is this a world changing issue, no, but it is many many little things like this where people relinquish their rights to "get what they want" in that moment (ends justifying the means) that slowly centralize and consolidate power. Then one day, there are laws that go against "what they want" and they can't understand what happened to their personal responsibility and freedom.
Let standards bodies create standards. Let companies chose to adopt those standards. Let the market (people with individual liberty) determine if those standards and choices benefit them.
To be fair, some of this is an emotional issue but
@dilbert99 is also concerned about accumulating e-waste, which is a legitimate concern. I haven't read the entire 200+ page report, so maybe there's something in there to change my mind, but I’m not personally convinced that mandating a charger standard will reduce waste— I think it’s likely to increase waste in the short run as people change over and then delay the development and adoption of new waste reducing technologies.
Another proposal in the report is requiring that phones be sold without chargers. I think that could have a significant impact on e-waste. I've got USB charger bricks coming out the wazoo at this point. Don't need another and if I do buy one it would be tailored to my needs. That's a place where a government mandate could do some good-- if the EU says "can't include the charger" then Apple is more protected from claims that they're penny pinching. A surprisingly small number of people are in favor of this idea, so it would probably take a government initiative to achieve it.
There are places where government intervention is really helpful. I mentioned lead (the metal) reduction earlier— that’s a place where the EU took the lead (different word this time) with their ROHS initiative, companies complained, but in the end it was quite effective. In that case, it was expensive to change production techniques and even a progressive company that understood the public health benefits of changing their materials would hesitate because it would put them at a competitive disadvantage. There was no incentive to really innovate because the product was much the same, just less toxic. So the question was just who would go first— government intervention ensured everyone took on the cost at the same time, so no one was put at a disadvantage.
This case doesn’t feel like that at all. As you say, the charger port doesn‘t feel world changing, but the overall power system is an area of intense interest. Battery technologies, safety, fast charging, wireless charging... I don’t see where a regulation on the port shape helps us. If they’d done this 15 years ago, we’d probably be stuck with those coaxial connectors. USB didn't even officially support battery charging until 2007. If the EU regulated this too early, there'd likely have been less innovation around delivering power over USB.
We're at a similar inflection point with wireless charging now, which makes it a strange time to start mandating anything. They need to just let this play out.
Just as important as getting good ideas to market quickly is letting bad ideas fail in the market quickly. Without a free market, it’s actually really hard to determine the subtle differences between good ideas and bad.
