No they weren't "clearly" already moving to USB-C. Every other device manufacturer in the world had been on USB-C for a half-decade and Apple were still shipping new devices with Lightning at the time this legislation came into effect. There is nothing clear about this - Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming.
Apple promised that Lightening would be the port for the next 10 years, and got raked over the coals by customers who thought moving from 30-PIN to Lightening was a money grab. That was a transition to a significantly better port, Lightening to USb-C was a sideways move for most customers.
They practically invented USB-C. They had already transferred Mac and iPad, the were just taking a bit longer with their most important product line than tech nerds wanted. Makes sense after what happened last time.
Not sure why you think we can agree on that. The EU was quite clear that if and when a better standard comes along that the legislation would be updated to reflect that and the fact that they pivoted the legislation from Micro-USB to USB-C only proves that they are able to do so quite easily. There is no additional barrier to the development of any new open standard connector that didn't exist before.
But another one won’t come along because there’s no ROI in developing one. Companies don’t just drop significant resources into a new port if they can’t use it in the EU.
If an amazing new port was introduced tomorrow? It would take 4-8 YEARS before the EU could update the standard.
To break it down for you:
- EU assumes better port isn’t likely soon, so standardizing on USB-C is safe.
- The law makes it harder (slower, costlier) for a better port to be introduced in the EU.
- Because the EU is a huge market, most manufacturers won’t design a new port at all unless it’s globally adopted, which won’t happen precisely because of the EU rule.
- Result; the assumption (“no better port soon”) becomes true because of the policy, not because of technical limits.
We already said this with the ill-fated attempt to Micro-USB which had the effect of slowing the transition to USB-C on the Android side.
At the time, regulators said micro-USB was good enough and innovation in charging plugs was unlikely to matter much soon (sound familiar? Also note it was dead wrong). But the voluntary standard effectively slowed the rollout of USB-C in smartphones in Europe because manufacturers didn’t want to produce different hardware for the EU vs. other regions.
The only thing that the EU made significantly harder is market abuse by entrenched market leaders who have previously been known to use thier market position to develop proprietary non-standard connections in order to further lock their customers into their device ecosystem. That is the intended purpose of the legislation.
That’s what the tell people, but it won’t do that at all. It’s making everyone’s products worse because that’s what design by bureaucracy does.
Not sure why you would suspect that. Apple has invented exactly one non-proprietary connection standard in their entire lifetime, and that was over 30 years ago. And even then, a significant amount of the work was done by another company (Sony). If another standard comes along, it'll be developed by a consortium of companies just like most of the current modern standards were.
It’s clear you really dislike Apple’s business model. Perhaps you should choose products that better align with your values than cheer on government in an attempt to regulate innovation away because their companies can’t compete by making my preferred products worse.
indianexpress.com
