Did you write the blog post entirely on your own? It reads like AI slop to me but maybe I'm just getting more sensitive. I can't decide whether we are all starting to mimic the same turns of phrase that LLMs like to use or whether just nobody writes anymore. I suspect the latter.
The cadence and wording sure reads like AI to me. OP, personally I find this really off putting and does not make me want to learn more about your app.
I think phone manufacturers will figure it out once it is a requirement. Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure. Are we in a better place because the EU forced it. You betcha. That's the point.
I don't love everything the EU does (cookie banners!?) but this is one where I have confidence that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
As others have noted, most people do not replace their phones every two years anymore, there just isn't any big reason to.
Cookie banners is malicious compliance. The ultimate goal being for you yo think it was bad legislation instead of how every company is fucking you for your privacy.
I'm not sure they're complying even with the letter of the law. Many cookie banners I see, require several clicks to deny anything but those they don't have to ask me about. And in most other cases, the accept button is significantly more visible than the deny one.
If that's actually allowed, yeah, bad law. If it's not… well I guess we can hope prosecutors will prosecute. Though I'm afraid we won't get much more than hope…
I'd say it was bad legislation because this was a foreseeable outcome. I actually worked on cookie banners, and we did user testing, a full 80% of people closed it before reading single word and thought it was an ad.
This type of ambush agree to XYZ or you can't come in that we see with EULA's and privacy polices is unfair, just like if some scammer demanded people sign a fifty page contract before they enter the supermarket. This is something people understand intuitively.
It was foreseeable, and the end result is very little has changed as far as consumer privacy. Most people just agree to get the box to go away, if you actually want privacy your best bet is still a private browsing session and a VPN.
Here is an idea, don't abuse your users and you don't even have to show a cookie banner. Of course people treat it like spam - because that is exactly what it is. A giant fuck you to every single user.
It doesn't have one on my phone (from inside thetge EU).
But if it did, it would most certainly because nobody in the administration takes IT seriously, and the web development agency which made the website just used their usual amount of trackers because they don't care about data protection whatsoever.
What do you think most users click? The quickest and easiest option ("agree"/ "that's fine”) to get on with their day. That then makes consent explicit which is worse than the previous gray area
The same way that the legislation that abolished slavery was bad because it didn’t account for the prison systems leasing out unpaid workers leading to even worse conditions for black folk in the US?
People talk as if the EU should have done nothing, or that the rule should be repealed, the GDPR forced people to have a functioning deny all.
The real lesson here is that people would rather annoy their users for money than create good products. Its a case for regulation.
I've come to realize (I think) that this actually does have a lot to do with waterproofness ratings -- a legibility trap.
I notice that Fairphone excludes headphones from their latest devices, and attributes it to the necessary of doing so in order to get an "IP55" rating.
I'm not sure if that ultimately makes sense (and suspect that it... doesn't), but the legibility trap of that ratings system might actually be part of the cause of the current market absence of a feature so many people still talk about after years of its unavailability.
Apple was a key member of the USB-C consortium, it was always planned to be their universal connector. They waited on switching to avoid public backlash about "why are you switching wires when I already bought all of these wires?". They generally give connectors 10 years before changing them (see 32-pin 2003 - 2012 etc). Doesn't invalidate your larger point, but it incorrectly describes the history of USB-C adoption by Apple.
> Was switching everyone to USB-C annoying for Apple? Sure.
Doubt. They have already switched over every other line they had.
I believe it was more of a marketing stunt, they calculated that n% of customers will be upset with the change, so they waited for the EU ruling so now they can just point these n% to blame the EU who will take the blame instead of them.
The iPhone 15 released in September 2023 already had USB-C. Apple wasn't required to use USB-C up until the iPhone 17 release in September 2025. That is two years.
> Apple wasn't required to use USB-C up until the iPhone 17 release in September 2025
No, starting December 28, 2024 they could no longer import and sell iPhones with Lightning ports, so they had to at the very least make the iPhone 16 in September 2024 USB-C.
But Apple likes to sell the previous model phone as "the cheap option", so to have a previous generation to keep selling they had to add USB-C a model year early.
Apple added USB-C to the iPhone as late as they possibly could with their typical product cycle.
> The regulation comes into force on December 28, and it applies to any individual iPhone unit placed for sale after that date, even if they are older models
> As for ‘making available’, the concept of placing on the market refers to each individual product, not to a type of product, and whether it was manufactured as an individual unit or in series. Consequently, placing on the Union market can only happen once for each individual product across the EU and does not take place in each Member State. Even though a product model or type has been supplied before new Union harmonisation legislation laying down new mandatory requirements entered into force, individual units of the same model or type, which are placed on the market after the new requirements have become applicable, must comply with these new requirements.
Everyone moving to USB-C was the same standard, though; now you can use the same charger with your phone, laptop, tablet, other random gadgets, etc. If you forget your charger you can buy one virtually anywhere, or borrow someone else's, since they're all the same.
Everyone moving to "battery must be replaceable without tools" doesn't do anything useful for most users. Yeah, now you can carry an extra battery on a camping trip, I guess, though you could also carry a portable USB-C charger and use it for more than just your phone. It isn't particularly useful that it doesn't take tools to replace the battery when it starts failing, five years after your phone was discontinued, if you can't find a replacement battery for that exact model.
> Everyone moving to USB-C was the same standard, though; now you can use the same charger with your phone, laptop, tablet, other random gadgets, etc.
You could already use the same charger with nearly everything. It was the cables that were not necessarily USB on the device end.
Apple for example as far as I can tell has used USB chargers for everything (phones, tablets, music players, headphones, Apple TV remote) except laptops since sometime in 2012. For laptops everything introduced after the last MagSafe 2 laptop in mid 2017 has used a USB charger.
I like usb C more than lightning but I think legislation is terribly suited. If people only wanted usb c then just don’t buy an iPhone? But this is from my US idealistic view and distrust of over regulation.
Anyways, Apple was working on an iPhone with usb C in 2022 and said they were going to do it anyways* so I don’t see it as some massive win that shows the prowess of the EU legislative body.
Granted this may have shaved a couple of years off of the timeline but at what cost of legislation (monetary, attention, and time cost)!?
When a product becomes as complex as a cell phone it's not as easy as saying "just get one that doesn't have ${thing}" as no product has the right combination of everything for everyone but people may agree every product should have something (whether it be for safety, environmental, buyer protection, or convenience reasons). Once most folks agree that's the case, it's about "where do you draw the line" rather than "does it make sense to require ${thing} in isolation when there are already options with ${thing}".
Your link is from 2020 and does not say Apple was moving to USB C, just that the industry was. By 2022 the law requiring it had already passed, so it would make sense they were planning on doing it at that point. Regardless, a few years would be a lot of impact for a market where over 100 million phones are sold annually.
Apple switched long after the Regulation was written by the Commission and handed to the European council. The fact that legislative process takes a long time (and that the EU always leave a long window to companies to comply) doesn't change the role of the EU here.
Apple was told that they wouldn't get the exemption they have had with micro-USB plugs this time, and they acted accordingly, diligently enough so that the regulation wouldn't disrupt their business.
USB-C ports are more fragile than Lightning - one of the three ports on my laptop will no longer hold cables in place anymore. It also requires more precise alignment to get the cable plugged in.
I agree, and it preceeded USB-C. It came out in a market that was almost overwhelmingly USB Micro B; which was an extremely terrible connector.
Apple really fucked up by keeping the connector proprietary. Sure it helped them slim some phones but it didn't exactly help long term, and now we have a technologically inferior connector that took even longer to come to market.
I can't forgive Apple for that.
Good engineering, early to market, mired by greedy and short sighted businessmen.
I thought this way too, but have since heard that the Lightning connector itself has the spring-loaded contacts that wear out, in contrast to USB-C where they're on the cable. So I don't think it's so straightforward
Sure, on paper the USB-C should be superior for that reason. But we have a lot of years of experience that suggests in practice the Lightning connector is more durable.
Don't let them off that quickly. We've been making electrical connectors for well over a hundred years. There are books on high reliability connectors many hundreds of pages long. Connectors for aerospace, the military and industry have made connector technology highly advanced and connections very reliable.
Fact is USB connectors are shitty because they've been made as cheaply as possible—cheap manufacturing takes precedence over reliability and user ergonomics.
The trend of mass producing rock-bottom cheap connectors started in the early 1950s with that abominable super cheap RCA audio connector and it's continued ever since with consumer products. There's no end of crappy designs, the F coaxial connector for antennas, the DIN audio connector, the Belling Lee coax and so on.
Trouble is too many consumers are prepared to tolerate the crap without complaining so it
continues.
Honestly, I’m not sure either. I can’t find anybody who actually went through the trouble of testing port/cable durability over many cycles.
I can personally speak to the seeming reliability of the springs on lightening, but thats anecdotal and would only apply to devices I’ve interacted with. Truthfully USB-C has been almost as reliable (only seen 2-3 ports with issues over literally hundreds, vs the 0 for lightning over a smaller sample).
I guess at some point the argument is moot, but I do like digging lint out of USB-C connectors a lot less- it is a lot more worrying to do.
Right, I'm no fan of USB-C either. One knows why the USB alliance keeps designing such shitty connectors. After so many attempts they've got it right—it's the cheapest crappy design they could get away with.
Apple USB-C ports and plugs are superb so maybe the design is not so bad. Maybe most manufacturers just use crappy ports to save a few cents. But yeah, mechanically Lightning was awesome. Great plug/port.
They also have a much higher data bandwidth and higher charge rate, so Apple would have most likely ditched lightning for something else at some point (though it would probably be some proprietary cable if not for the EU regulation)
> This isn’t a minor detail, it’s the core constraint that shaped virtually every habit and institution in our industry.
I am so so tired of this turn of phrase in LLM created content. I guess I don't know for sure whether this article was LLM written but I suspect so. Or, scarier still we are changing our own writing to match this slop.
You are falling into the trap of thinking there's a single monolithic being called Software Developers that has inconsistent opinions. In fact, you're observing different people with conflicting values.
Yeah yeah. But LLMs certainly have been embraced by a large number of developers. Many of whom I've observed react with disgust when they see "not X, but Y" or emdashes in an article. But when it comes to code, "wow this is so awesome!"
One is made for humans to consume, the other for a compiler or interpreter. Good code is supposed to look like other code and follow common patterns. The best writing is original and novel.
I have no issue with with code generated by e.g. Claude because it's not "slop".
On average, it's probably better than the code I would write.
I say "on average" because AI doesn't make stupid mistakes, doesn't invert logical conditions. I know I do. Which I eventually fix, but it's better to not make them in the first place, hence "on average".
And in cases that AI doesn't generate code up to my quality standards, I re-prompt it until it does. Or fix it myself.
I'm not a hapless victim of AI. I'm a supervisor. I operate a machine that generates good code most of the time but not all of the time. I'm there to spot and correct the "not all of the time" cases.
But that's my point. LLMs generate good prose "most of the time", certainly better than most people are capable of doing. Yet we frequently react with disgust when we see tell-tale signs of LLM-generated text in articles. Why? Because it indicates the person was probably too lazy to write it themselves and are simply chucking a half-formed thought over the wall? Why don't we hold generated code to the same standard?
I've been struggling on finding a reasonably priced model to use with my toy openclaw instance. Opus 4.6 felt kinda magical but that's just too expensive and I'm not risking my max subscription for it.
GPT 5.4 mini is the first alternative that is both affordable and decent. Pretty impressed. On a $20 codex plan I think I'm pretty set and the value is there for me.
Maybe that's a good thing? I miss the Seattle of the 2000s that was less overflowing with tech and more a mix of incomes.
I for one support the tax. The dichotomy of being a liberal state with a regressive tax structure needs to stop. Slippery slope argument aside this tax is a good first step. Income tax while imperfect seems to be the best system we have to tax the rich and not the poor.
Washington also has a capital gains tax now, 7% on long-term capital gains above $270k, and 9.9% on gains above $1 million, exempting real estate and retirement accounts.
This made me laugh only because I imagine there could possibly be some truth to it. This is the world we are in. Maybe they all loaded codex to fix their deploy? ;)
Rule of law is so important, and society (especially the vulnerable) suffers when weak leaders fail to enforce the law. That said, we can have our cake and eat it too - strong law enforcement (a la Singapore style) can occur without mocking wrong doers.
I hope you understand that you have never been able to take photos the gov releases at face value.
But today, we know this administration will openly lie, and double down in the face of any refutable proof. Literally since DAY ONE they tried to push a crowd size narrative that we all saw in real time was a lie.
Yes, it was good this was caught and reported on. But this will become normalized and we seem to be sprinting full speed towards not being able to know what to believe. That the State is engaging in this is concerning to say the least.
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