The European Union (EU) has reached an agreement that will make USB-C charging no longer just a convenience but a requirement for iPhones and all other mobile phones by the fall of 2024. The plan extends to additional consumer electronics using wired charging, including digital cameras, tablets, and, at a later date, laptops.
Today’s announcement shows the EU Parliament and Council agreeing to terms for universal USB-C charging, something the parliament has spent 10 years arguing for. In September, the European Commission announced its intent to enact legislation requiring USB-C charging. The next step will be for the EU Parliament and Council to formally approve the agreement.
A long time coming, but now it’s finally happening.
Yay… ish…
I would agree 100% for phones and tablets. We can even argue that it is already a bit late with too many different cables laying all around.
But for laptops? There is still some way to go. Maybe after Thunderbolt 4 / higher power charging cables become standard. For now, I still need to hunt the right cable / adapter combination to get proper output. TB3 cables are okay, but they tend to be very short, and expensive. Compared to that my old laptop power brick has at least 3x more length.
Can USB-C even power something like an Area-51m? The thing comes with two power adapters that have to be used at the same time: A 330W and a 180W adapter.
Latest USB Power Delivery allows for up to 240W per cable (revision 3.1 EPR mode). So, two USB-C power bricks should suffice for powering this laptop?
Last time I checked, 330 + 180 was greater than 2 × 240.
It within 6% of difference, it’s negligible.
zdzichu ,
We shouldn’t be fudging numbers because they’re close. Power limits are there to be followed otherwise it would and should fail safety compliance. Drawing too much current can be a fire risk. If on the other hand you are saying that the device should be performance throttled to draw less max power, then that’s fair enough, but that may not be what extreme PC owners want.
zdzichu,
And what about the next version? Will it require 3 adapters?
330W x2 = 660W, which is almost 240W (type-C) x3
sukru,
Yeah good point. The intention of standards are good, but they should have been executed much sooner.
I also was skeptical about the laptop part. It’s may be ok for some, but others are going to be limited if they’re forced to use usb-c for power.
I haven’t read the law, but logically if there’s only one external power source and it is insufficient, then full power will only be achievable with the battery providing assistance. When the battery goes low then the laptop will have to operate in reduced power mode even though it’s plugged in.
This is something that has already happened with Apple’s Notebooks. Even going back to the Titanium PowerBooks. Those required a working battery with even 1% of original capacity otherwise they throttled the CPU.
kurkosdr,
I don’t think USB-C can power those laptops. It will be interesting to see how this is handled. Maybe they will (re)introduce “portable workstation” as a separate category.
Alfman,
There is already support for running partially from battery on current laptops. At least mine does that.
If I use a generic 60W type-C charger on my Dell, it shows a warning, yet works fine. The internal power management system is capable of doing exactly this. But that of course causes another issue. Battery life will be cut short, and it will need to be replaced sooner.
And if I boot with a low power adapter at 1% battery, I can easily feel the system running much slower.
Does this mean Apple can potentially introduce a “pocketable workstation” category? (which will be their usual iPhones but with slightly more rounded edges). I highly doubt the law cares how you call your device
It’s a big problem nobody has considered. I personally like desktop replacement laptops because I have never used a laptop with a 15-inches screen or above as an actual laptop (it always goes from desk to desk and it’s always plugged in), so I prefer to not pretend that laptops with a 15-inches screen or above are mobile devices (they are portable but not mobile) so I tend to go for a big 17-inch screen and lots of performance.
kurkosdr,
As a legal matter, I don’t know how the law should address this. But it would be an interesting category nevertheless. It would place a hard limit on power consumption: “best USB-c powered laptop.”. I would suggest that the battery should be removed for the test to make sure manufacturers don’t fudge the numbers by borrowing battery power, but now that batteries are soldered in it’s harder to do.
I was going to disagree with the first part of your sentence, until you said the second part
Yeah, I use a high end desktop for the majority of my work, the laptops are more for backup and occasional travel rather than regular usage so I can get by with lower models, but If I were using it for regular usage I would strongly prefer something larger & more powerful.
Laptops themselves don’t (and can’t) consume much power without becoming a health and fire hazard. There’s simply not enough cooling capacity in this form factor, and the risk of misuse (closing down the lid, placing a working laptop on a bed or in a backpack) is high.
Most of power requirements come from the laptop being a hub for other devices and this could be solved by moving this function out, to the docking station. Laptop only needs to serve the devices it would need when operating on the battery power, a USB memory, and maybe a keyboard and a mouse.
Too bad these docks are so incompatible. I recently got a Lenovo monitor with a USB-C hub built in and only half of the functions work with an HP laptop despite having all the drivers installed.
ndrw,
I don’t know how safe this assumption is in practice, but IMHO mobile devices really should be designed to handle those exact scenarios without catching fire. I’ve seen laptops overheat but they turned off before becoming a fire hazard. (Usually it’s caused by the accumulation of fuzz in the fan).
I don’t see a problem that needs solving though…a high end laptop that can source power for external peripherals is fine. External dongles are really unappealing IMHO.
Yeah I agree.. For me personally I wouldn’t invest in a dock because I don’t want to be vendor locked in the future. It would be nice if docks were standardized but I don’t see it happening, at least not between different manufacturers.
I was following this development closely here in the UK, but oh, wait…
LOL.
The good thing with EU regulations on consumer products is they end-up being worldwide standards everyone aligns to, whether you’re (still) part of the EU or not.
I wish the same applied to many other fields of law.
Standards are nice and all but I keep asking myself, what about the next connector to come and improve on USB-C? Does this mean we’ll not be able to get a better connector because the law requires USB-C?
I mean imagine if this had been imposed when USB-Mini was the default? Would we have been unable to move to USB-C which is a world apart from what we had before? Would this law have kept that innovation from coming into existence had the law been here 5-10 years ago before the connector was created?
In 2009 the EU asked for the adoption of a unique connector on phones and tablets [ https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_09_1049 ], micro-USB won.
And today the EU Council forced the adoption of USB-C.
That is indeed the problem. We all know that tech innovates and changes constantly. The idea that in – say – ten years USB-C will be the best option is far from certain. Will we even need a cable socket in a few years? Who should manage innovation over time? Should it be up to the private sector constrained by consumer choices or should it be a transnational political bureaucracy that takes years to make a decision?
I do find it odd that the people who most stridently demand that the end user must have total control over their devices seems to often be the same people who want to cede control of a key feature of its design to a transnational political bureaucracy.
Obviously everybody gets irritated at some point by the (I have to say relatively trivial) demands of managing a diverse cable collection but isn’t the existence of a diverse cable ecosystem, including legacy standards, just a symptom of a period of rapid technical innovation? Is freezing technical standards, and only being able to unfreeze them via a cumbersome transnational political bureaucracy, the best option here?
@Strossen
The fact that the industry chose micro-USB 13 years ago and USB-C today prove that the innovation is not stopped by the rules.
ultrabill,
micro usb was a terrible connector…it was sold to us under false pretenses of durability. Best we don’t use that one as an example of what industry and government did right, haha.
@Alfman
Maybe you don’t remember the era where every phone manufacturer has its own connector (Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel, HTC, etc.). Even the power connector was different for products of the same brand. What a time I don’t miss.
Now everyone is on USB-C, it’s pretty nice. Rendez-vous in 10/15 years for the next one.
ultrabill,
I do remember and I am in favor of standards, but I’d also qualify that by saying they have to be good standards. Micro-usb was particularly prone to breaking and my family alone had to throw away many phones on account of micro-usb failing prematurely. I suspect there are a lot of people who think micro-usb was bad.
I think usb-c should have had a clearer roadmap electrically, but I agree that physical the usb-c port is nice. It’s more robust and solves the problem of not knowing which way to plug it in. There are pragmatic limits to “one size fits all” though I don’t know that I want usb-c to be the standard for laptops too., A stronger connector with more power might be better suited for larger devices.
Edit: this wouldn’t just be good for external perfierals, but even internal ones like GPUs could use a good high power standard too!
It was still better than tons of proprietary connectors we had before it. Yes, it had problems but it solved the issue we had back then. If anything, it was the success that became its main weakness – the designers didn’t expect these cables to be used tso intensively.
ndrw,
I think we’re now giving it the benefit of doubt because it was the standard replacing proprietary connectors. But I feel that had micro-usb not been the standard and was instead just another proprietary connector, everyone would have been thankful to replace it with a better standard. Unfortunately it was the standard though
Well I think the designers did explicitly consider how much the cables would be used. They ran automated tests to show it would last twice as long as mini-usb cables and durability was supposed to be a selling point. However they were wrong and those tests were flawed because they only measured insertion and ejection using a perfect machine. In the real world lateral forces is what caused micro usb to loosen and break so easily. Not to mention attempts to plug it in backwards in the dark. I still have mini-usb devices that make a solid connection and have more confidence with them than I ever had with micro-usb. I’m glad most arduinos stuck with the sturdier mini-usb instead of micro-usb.
I guess there’s not much point in hashing over it now and I think everyone’s learned from earlier mistakes. We can all be glad micro-usb is mostly behind us with usb-c being the new and much improved standard.
Alfman,
Micro-USB has become popular on its own merits (being a standard, being USB and being small) long before EU mandated the use of it. It has served us well, imagine every single gadget (not just cell phones) still using a different connector/cable/charger.
Micro-USB is still perfectly adequate for many applications but it was not up for the heavy duty tasks it ended up performing. When it was devised mobile phones were (and in some aspects still are) considered non-critical, short-lived, light duty cycle devices. And then we started buying $1000 phones, keep all private data on them, use them every couple of minutes and charge them 1-2x a day.
The problem was spotted and now we have USB-C, which pretty much solves micro-USB issues. Unfortunately, it has added many issues of its own but these are not related to the physical design of the connector.
ndrw,
Well that’s kind of a big problem though. Obviously it wasn’t up for “Heavy duty”, but arguably in retrospect it was too fragile even under normal use. A lot of devices would stop taking a charge and one would realize that if the cable could be propped in a certain way it would make contact again. After the first failure I chalked it up to bad luck and/or user error, but I was extremely careful with my subsequent devices and I saw the same problem developing again. It turned out to be a common problem for others too. IMHO the connector should outlast the device under normal use. I had no other complaints about it, but if you can’t power your device it ends up being a point of critical failure.
I completely agree with you on this.
As we keep introducing more power profiles for high current and wattage it’s going to be all the more important for consumers to keep track of what cables and chargers are compatible with their devices. In theory current and voltage are supposed to be negotiated via software, but with cheap/generic accessories I don’t know how much we should trust that across the board.
Incidentally I had a habit of treating usb-c cables & chargers as interchangeable until one day the charger and both ends of the usb-c cable got extremely hot. I tried to diagnose the problem later but was not able to reproduce it using all the same equipment. It was an OEM fast charger but for a different phone and a 3rd party cable. I decided to throw it all away because I did not identify the cause and didn’t want to risk it happening again.
This is a caveat of once size fits all connector and it makes me wonder if we should be repurposing usb-c for high power devices. I fully appreciate the benefits of standardization but I think it’s fair to ask if it needs to be the same standard as low power devices. It may be better and safer to have a dedicated standard for higher power.
Strossen,
Those are completely valid points/questions. But at the same time we shouldn’t really deny that standards do have value to consumers and that needless changing of connectors causes problems. There needs to be a middle ground where we benefit from medium term standards while not stopping long term innovation.
Actually I don’t think it’s odd at all. The absence of standards does not give us more control, it gives us less. Standards play an important role in giving us more control over devices.
While there may be room for real innovation, when so many cables end up doing the exact same thing only in incompatible ways, I don’t think that’s innovative. I think “innovation” can end up be a nicer way to describe what companies are actually doing, which is creating incompatible cables to sell more accessories and earn more royalties.
Alfman,
I would have to disagree on choice.
Not having standards gave us better cellular networks. GSM was using TDMA up until 2G or even GPRS era. And it was mandated in the EU region.
In the US, being not bound by standards, Qualcomm was able to introduce a competing, and technically better way to share the wireless spectrum:
https://www.ericsson.com/en/about-us/history/changing-the-world/big-bang/the-launch-of-cdma
And then GSM switched to CDMA later on (in 3G? I think).
(Side note: TDMA/Time Division Multiple Access mandates equal time to all cell phones, even when they are not actively using the network. CDMA/Code-division multiple access allows on demand usage, hence much better utilization of the capacity).
US has a bit of “anarchy”, but things eventually work out. There is for example no charger standard, but almost all mobile devices now arrive with a type-C port.
Except Apple, which I would concede requires “adult supervision”. Maybe EU should sit together with Apple only to get them on board with the rest of the industry.
Or, to phrase better: once a good solution is found, it might be okay to prevent bad ones.
sukru,
Well, technically aren’t those all standards? Imagine if all the countries and manufacturer had come up with their own proprietary protocols and nothing could interoperate. This happened to a degree, but thanks to having some shared standards I could travel to Europe and my US phone actually worked!
Are you sure you aren’t referring to TDM?
https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/TDMA
TDMA won’t assign you a time slot unless you are in an active session.
Maybe it’s just me, but I think standards are more important than that. Even with usb-c poor adherence to standard from one manufacture to another is problematic and even dangerous at times. When you start looking at variable voltage standard compliance becomes all the more important.
https://www.androidauthority.com/state-of-usb-c-870996/
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/30/amazon-clamps-down-dangerous-usb-c-cables
Would it be fair of me to reinterpret your argument as meaning that standards are good, but government regulation of them is not? I would probably be able to agree with you more if that was the case.
Alfman,
You are probably right about TDM/TDMA. That being said, data sessions used to be billed by minute, meaning session needed to be “on” while you had an IP address?. Anyway, that delayed mobile Internet adoption.
As for standards, I probably need to “cook” this a bit more. But I would say “government should do ‘just the right amount’ of standards enforcement”.
Take electricity. We have standards on cable length and quality. Otherwise we can easily go “cheap” and start fires. (Who needs that pesky ground connection anyway?)
Or again EU and mobile networks. When industry came together for roaming, they decided to gouge the customers as much as possible. Worse? You live near the border, and get signal from the country over? Get ready for a thousand Dollars (or Euros) bill. So EU setting roaming standards is also a good thing.
Again, tough to word it. But “with some miracle” I would prefer just the positive effects of governments in standards, but not the hindrance.
sukru,
I really don’t know the specifics. I didn’t have and couldn’t afford mobile internet back then.
I was thinking that the choice of protocols is less important to me as a consumer than the choice between competitive providers.
It really helped when regulators forced phone companies to allow customers to unlock phones. The phone industry’s sim card locking was awful before that.
Haha, vague, but I know what you mean. I don’t think the government and our representatives have a clue technically when it comes to making good standards. However they do play an important role in actually getting everyone onto standards and representing consumer interests. I think it’s especially important that they promote open vendor neutral standards.
> Standards are nice and all but I keep asking myself, what about the next connector to come and improve on USB-C?
Remember the SCART plug?
Stupid…that’s like mandating BetaMax