One cable for everyone
Jalal Official (royalthree)
on
January 15, 2022
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The new
regulation is good for the environment and
convenient for consumers :
nevertheless, it is a mistake that the EU
Commission wants to force standard
Ladekabel
Smartphone and tablets by law . On
Thursday, the Brussels authority presented
the relevant draft directive. According
to this, only smartphones, tablets, cameras
or game consoles that are charged with USB-C
cables may be sold in the future. This
connection is anyway the most common in
mobile phones. Only the US company Apple
uses its own standard called Lightning for
smartphones. But that will soon be over.
The law,
which the EU Parliament and Council of
Ministers still have to approve, is intended
to put an end to annoying trouble with
cables. If you forgot your charger at
home while on holiday, you can simply use
that of friends. In addition, it should
always be possible to buy
new smartphones in the future
without a charger included. The
Commission's hope is that if you already have
a suitable charger in your drawer, you'll
just buy the phone. This saves consumers
money and reduces the consumption of raw
materials and mountains of electronic waste.
Apple has to change the design of
its devices against its will
This means
a little less sales for the manufacturers,
but they will be able to cope with
that. The only big loser, it seems,
is Apple . The Californians
have to change the technology and
design of their cell phones and tablets
against their will, probably
worldwide; after all, it would be too
expensive to produce one version for Europe
and one for the rest of the world. But a
billionaire company like Apple will be fine
with that.
Despite
the nice benefits and manageable burdens, the
Commission should have waived the
law. Because the establishment of USB-C
as a de facto probably worldwide standard can
hinder innovations. Apple could make
great improvements to the Lightning model, or
maybe another manufacturer would come up with
a superior third standard. That will no
longer happen because the authority decided
on September 23, 2021 that the future is
called USB-C.
Does this step perhaps only serve
to cultivate the image of Brussels?
In
addition, this law is a very harsh
encroachment on economic freedom - for a
rather small problem. The industry has
already reduced the number of charging cable
types from 30 to three and soon only two
within ten years through voluntary
commitments. The third surviving
standard, Micro-USB, is being phased
out. So consumers have a lot
less trouble than they used to. And if
the level of suffering were really that
great, customers could simply punish the
Apple group for going its own way: by
preferring to buy a smartphone from Samsung
or another rival. That way the market
would make its judgement.
But the
Commission does not trust the judgment of the
market. Instead, it relies on dirigisme
and detailed specifications from the very
top. This is a worrying signal for an
authority that has a say in
Europe's economic policy. In
addition, the suspicion arises that the
Commission also devised the law for the sake
of image cultivation: the EU is
abstract and complicated; so it's good
to keep showing the public what concrete
advantages Brussels brings. But the EU
has no need of such clumsy advertising.
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