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India to mandate USB-C connectors on smartphones and laptops by 2026
(www.gsmarena.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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Omg you are so SMART! How is it that ONLY YOU have thought of this?!! You should, like, rule the world or something, because you're clearly so much SMARTER than everybody else!
Ah wait no, the EU directive already has allowances for newly emerging standards and isn't actually tied to USB-C specifically. I.e. if a USB-D came out, it could be used without changes to the law.
This India one is likely the same, or can be easily amended if it isn't.
And new standards take time to propagate in the market. USB C was designed in 2012 and the first phone with it was in 2015, from some unknown Chinese brand. It took major brands until 2017! And other devices took even longer than phones. Do you really think they couldn't update USB-C to D in the law in a timeframe like that? Of course they could.
USB-C is also ridiculously future proof and flexible, because it's just a connector.
We are already doing 200w power and 40gbps data transfer rates, using various standards.
Now, standardising on a standard would be neat. But that isn't going to happen
Indeed. USB-C is already a lot more feature-rich now than it was when initially designed, yet it hasn't necessitated moving to a different port or broken protocol compatibility with older USB versions.
I'm just pointing out that even if we decide to move beyond USB-C, the law already allows for that.
I truly don't understand why some are against the law pushing for a standard here. Would these people like it if different branded lightbulbs used different sockets? Or their TV, toaster, washing machine, playstation etc all used different plug sockets? Or only Volkswagen garages had fuel nozzles that fit into Volkswagen cars? Standards are a good thing.
This is the downside of USB-C: a single connector used by many different capability ports and cables. On another thread I was complaining that laptops/computers still have too few USB-C ports and too many USB-A that I want to migrate away from. Why shouldn’t I be able to have all small, symmetrical connectors, like I have for the last decade with Lightning?
Some of the answers were that you can’t support the power and bandwidth for that many and there is no easy way to distinguish either ports or cables that do from those that don’t. That’s a pretty bad excuse when standardized marking could take care of that so easily. Even with USB-A there is a convention with color of the port - it would be trivial to do the same
If I traveled 100 years into the future I actually wouldn't be surprised if they're still using USB-C. A different version of USBC but it'll still be the same cable, the only reason they would upgrade to another cable is if they decided for some reason that it needed to be able to carry enough current to vaporize you.
Oh yes I’m almost as smart as the geniuses involved in EU tech laws that wanted to spy on all your encrypted conversations.
Clearly the EU only employs the best and brightest, who never make stupid decisions.
Could is not the problem. Nearly all of today’s problems could be solved through effective legislation. The problem isn’t could they, it’s would they and who would push for the updated laws.
Do you mean the one that was proposed and then was immediately shot down? Try reading beyond the scary headlines. Any representative can propose a law, doesn't mean it'll get voted through and enacted.
Like I said, the law doesn't need to be updated as it was forward-thinking in its design. It already allows for emerging standards. And why would they decide not to update it if they didn't have that provision? Why would they do that?