I can’t believe this is happening but I have to side with Apple. The EU approved and in the near future will enforce a legislation requiring all charging cables to be USB-C, first on mobile devices and eventually on notebooks. This is bad, this curbs innovation. The USB forum and USB-C are not the be all end all of power transfer.
The alleged goal was to reduce e-waste by making cables more universal. I think this might be a convenient and thin veil over the true reason: everyone is fed up with Apple’s shenanigans and proprietary cables in general. In either case the goal was to make cables more universal, something I also desire.
In my opinion a better solution would have been to end or reduce intellectual property protection for cable standards so everyone can make clones. This ends the incentive for every company to have its own proprietary cable and demand licensing fees from third parties.
If you would like to know why the current framework is so bad, Richard Stallman has a two hours talk on the history of intellectual property (also available on youtube).
Now suppose you created a new cable standard that is better for some specific use case: it’s stronger, or more compact, or less likely to break in normal usage or mud resistant. What are the chances you will be able to push this as a new standard? Zero. Even if it was better than USB-C in every possible conceivable scenario, lots of companies will still lobby against it because they don’t really need the new features and keeping their production line and designs intact is the sound business decision.
I haven’t read the entire law but assume there is an exception for devices made under, say, 50.000 units: This still doesn’t solve the problem, this just poses an arbitrary barrier to success, if your new cable standard happens to be a success and you happen to sell more than 50.000 units, you will still have to deal with companies selling hundreds of millions of devices that have no interest in your new standard.
Politicians shouldn’t make technological decisions, technocracies might sound cool in theory but they are actually quite terrible and never very technical.