Future iPhones will offer a USB-C port, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Greg “Joz” Joswiak has confirmed.
Mark Gurman for Bloomberg News:
Apple Inc. will need to comply with a European Union law to switch the iPhone to a USB-C charger…
Joswiak said that the company will comply as it does with other laws. He declined to specify when the iPhone may get the charger to replace Lightning. He made the comments at a Wall Street Journal conference in Laguna Beach, California.
He said Apple and the EU had been at odds over chargers for a decade, recalling how European authorities once wanted Apple to adopt Micro-USB. He said that neither Lightning — the current iPhone charging port — nor the now-ubiquitous USB-C would have been invented if that switch had occurred.
Apple is planning to switch the iPhone to USB-C next year, Bloomberg News has reported. The law goes into effect in 2024.
MacDailyNews Take: As expected.
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. – MacDailyNews, October 4, 2022
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
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About time too.
Standardization is a good thing for everyone. Imagine if there was no standard electrical outlet in use – there would be appliances designed for every type of outlet, resulting in higher costs all around.
THANK YOU EUROPE FOR MAKING THIS POSSIBLE🎉
We are talking about the CONNECTOR here. We are not talking about the data rates, the data signaling formats, the protocols, or anything else other than the physical connector itself.
At the moment, standards are pushing up through 120 Gbps in one direction and concurrently up through 40 Gbps in the other direction OR up through 80 Gbps concurrently in both directions with USB-4 V2, Thunderbolt “5”, HDMI, DisplayPort, and other protocols all supported by the USB Type-C Connector. Several of those protocols won’t be universally available to the general public for a couple of years.
Someday the USB Type-C connector will run out of headroom. It is just like the USB Type-A connector did. It is just like the original Firewire connector did. It is just like the original DB-9 connector did. It is just like countless others.
However, at the moment the eventual limitation of the USB Type-C connector looks like several years away. The impact of the limitations of the USB Type-C connector very likely won’t show up to the general public until after 2030.
The numbers of connectors that you note, does I agree, represent a mess. But they were all intended for different purposes and represent connector evolution. However do you really think that USB3 connections will replace HDMI? That is naive. As far as phones, one of our most ubiquitous devices, there are over a billion users of lightning connectors currently and the real issue is not the cables but the plug in bricks. There are USB-C to lightning cables – doesn’t that minimize e-waste of those plug in bricks?. I am in support of standardization but this was as much anti Apple as it was pro standardization. Personally I can not remember the last time I even used a charging cable. What is the EU going to do with wireless charging – force OEM to add a USB-C port anyway?