You care when it stops working one day because Apple changed something (maybe intentionally). Out of a combination of spite and cheapness, I've only ever bought unlicensed cables for several years, and this is the price I've paid over time.
So how well are the USB C cables going to work that follow the minimum “mandate” that doesn’t require cables to support data at all? How well are they going to work when people pick up a “USB C” cable and wonder why they aren’t seeing video when they connect their phone to their TV?
Not very well, but you can buy decent cables from a variety of manufacturers for cheap, and there isn't this one license-holder (Apple) out there trying to take a big cut from that. If someone wants to make a good Lightning cable for cheap, first they have to break the law by skipping the licensing deal, then they have to get around Apple's own mechanisms.
It doesn’t prevent “ewaste” if phone makers (mostly low end Android phone makers) still bundle shoddy cables, stores are still allowed to sell shoddy cables, etc.
A “good” USB C cable that supports all of the things I said - high speed data, video over USB, etc - costs around $15. The same price as an Anker Lightning cable.
A random USB C cable doesn’t support video over USB - something I need for my portable secondary display.
The iPads with USB C already support this. I have no reason to believe that the next iPhone won’t.
> A “good” USB C cable that supports all of the things I said - high speed data, video over USB, etc - costs around $15. The same price as an Anker Lightning cable.
But the Lightning cable won't support high speed data. And if you want video over Lightning you can't just use a cable, you need an adapter with an embedded computer to decompress the output.
A USB C cable that has the same capabilities as that Lightning cable is 2-3 dollars.
The EU is suppose to be mandating a “standard”. What good is a “standard” that doesn’t support the “standard”?
USB C cables that come with the iPad supports all of those standards. What are the chances that unsuspecting users in the EU dancing in the streets go in an buy a “standard USB C” and find out that it doesn’t work when they get ready to plug their phone to the TVs or when they find out the promise of “USB3 speeds” because it was the “standard” is a lie because the EU didn’t mandate that as part of the standard?
> The purported goal is to “prevent ewaste”. How does it prevent ewaste if you still can’t depend on the cords working the way they should?
For charging, it's fine.
> Is that the bar we set now? It’s no better than what came before?
A charging standard shouldn't care about data except to avoid getting in the way, and it probably shouldn't mandate more expensive cables for devices that don't have data.
Also USB C supports more power than lightning.
But to directly answer: That bar is just fine, because the point is the make everyone use the same thing. It doesn't need to be better, it needs to be good and everyone the same.
People just want to charge their phones. Maybe if someone actually cares about USB3 transfer speeds, they'll go buy the slightly more expensive cable for that. It's not like TVs even have USB-C.
And I don't think this reduces ewaste. It's about the same.
What wattage, enough to charge my phone. What speed, don't really care but it's at least the same as Lightning. Video, never used it.
EU wanted to break up Apple's proprietary control over the iPhone ports and create a charging standard, cause charging is the important part. Anyone can make a higher-spec USB-C cable without going to Apple, and chargers are uniform for all phones.
Worth repeating that I don't agree with the EU's law, just saying why they did it. Nobody in this thread has brought up the real con, which is that tech regulation hinders innovation, and the minor frustration with chargers wasn't a big enough problem to warrant that.
You're actually right about the video -C cables. That feature costs extra, and I didn't notice the first time. But it's rare to need one, and they'll get cheaper over time.
That 3-pack MFi Lightning for $10 is a new phenomenon. It was never like that before. I can believe it's not fake, just cheap cause it's old tech and on its way out.
> So how well are the USB C cables going to work that follow the minimum “mandate” that doesn’t require cables to support data at all?
Citation needed? I think those are below the minimum.
> How well are they going to work when people pick up a “USB C” cable and wonder why they aren’t seeing video when they connect their phone to their TV?
They probably feel similar to people with lightning cables.
Lightning doesn't support video over mere cables. You need a complicated adapter that decompresses the video sent by the device. It's like a tiny streaming setup.
If you just pick up a generic lightning cable, you're not getting video.
Yeah, Lightning doesn't run HDMI or DP over it. I think Lightning still has some kind of video protocol for those adapters to work. USB (non-C) to HDMI requires special software on the host.
And they all require data wires. The minimum speed is the same speed as Lightning. And the minimum wattage is higher than Lightning as far as I am aware.
They definitely don’t. The USB C cord that came with the previous MacBook Pros were power only as are a lot of other USB C cables especially ones that come with headphones.
The maximum wattage of the little USB C cable that comes with headphones certainly don’t support a minimum wattage that will charge a large iPhone at any appreciable speed.
> The USB C cord that came with the previous MacBook Pros were power only
Which ones? The posts I can find say they do USB 2.0
> a lot of other USB C cables especially ones that come with headphones.
> The maximum wattage of the little USB C cable that comes with headphones certainly don’t support a minimum wattage that will charge a large iPhone at any appreciable speed.
Those cables don't meet the standard, then. The minimum is 3 amps and a single pair of data wires. And that doesn't require much, especially for a little 6 inch cable.
It mandates a USB C connector. They weren’t smart enough to mandate that “all USB C cables sold in the EU must actually meet the standard”.
Then you also have the opposite problem. If the USB cable supports higher wattage power delivery, some low wattage USB C devices like headphones won’t charge.
> It mandates a USB C connector. They weren’t smart enough to mandate that “all USB C cables sold in the EU must actually meet the standard”.
Then I don't know why you're spending so many posts purely about cables in complaint of this law. Cables have gone from unregulated to unregulated.
If your underlying argument is "this is in the right direction but they should have gone further", you are not coming across that way with all your other posts.
> Then you also have the opposite problem. If the USB cable supports higher wattage power delivery, some low wattage USB C devices like headphones won’t charge.
Do you mean like the thing with raspberry pis? That wasn't about wattage, their miswiring meant that any cable with a tag would fail.
Otherwise I don't see how that kind of failure is possible.
