Comment by jules 17 hours ago
There should be no need whatsoever to convince your competitors and/or bureaucrats that allowing your new connector to be produced is in their interest. Only one should be convinced: the person buying the device.
We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
But clearly there is a price for the standardisation, it makes progress slower. On the other hand it makes everyone's lifes easier. Just as with e.g electrical outlets in the house there is a time for exploration and innovation, and there is a time for standardisation. And we are ready for standardisation now, USB-c is good enough.
USB-c is absolutely not good enough. The connectors are often incompatible due to tiny manufacturing tolerances, cables from different manufacturers often fall out of the port after longer term use, don't make good connection so you have flaky charging, the cables and connectors look the same but are actually incompatible due to supporting only USB 2/3/4 or thunderbolt, whether displayport/hdmi alt mode is supported, etc. This small short-term gain at the cost of locking in USB-c forever was a terrible idea, brought to you by the same hypercompetent group that mandated cookie banners.
> We tried that for 40 years. The result is drawers full of chargers.
Which is a fine? The industry eventually converged to just a handful of common standards on its own.
You can’t innovate without being able to experiment. Which is only possible if there are actual people using your product. Thinking that a committee of bureaucrats can replace that is silly.
A handful of common standards is useless.
One standard for chargers is the only acceptable outcome and it wouldn't have gotten there without regulation.
What need is there to experiment with chargers? Wire go in, power go through - it's really not that complicated, the only important thing is standardization.
> But we might still be stuck with floppy drives with a mindset like that.
That seems like a false equivalency to me. It seems quite obvious that storage media have more potential for development than charging wires.
Wire go in - power go through, is literally all they need to do and USB-C does that pretty well.
The "bureaucrats" are a proxy for the person buying the device. That's literally the point of representative democracy. The average person doesn't want to make a million decisions on technical standards, so they elect somebody they trust to make them for them.
If Apple made both USB-C and Lightning variants and let people choose: then sure, let the market decide.
In reality an oligopoly was stuck in a crappy stalemate and people had only compromised options. Carrying two sets of wires everywhere sucked.