Thunder and (no more) Lightning — The European Union’s Proposed Rules on Chargers
The European Union recently announced new plans to standardize all charging ports by 2024, a decision that may completely change the dynamics of the consumer electronics industry in the near future. According to the recently released proposal, all other types of electric-electronic charging interfaces will be replaced by one common USB-C charging standard for all devices. This essentially means that there will no longer be different types of chargers for different types of devices, removing the need for consumers to keep multiple chargers for different devices.
Whereas this seems to be an excellent way to reduce long term electronic waste (the primary reason for the EU Commission putting forth this proposal), this article isn’t here to discuss the merits and demerits of the legislation. This article exists only to bring out the volumes of irony that came up with a certain company’s response to the EU’s directive.
Thunder and (no more) Lightning
Remember in late 2020, when there was huge uproar against a certain company for not including chargers with their flagship phones? This company had apparently adopted that particular policy for safeguarding environmental sustenance, and to ensure that more and more chargers were not wasted. So, Apple simply took the chargers out of the box, and sold it separately at the usual ridiculous Apple prices. So I guess they were preventing people from buying new chargers if they had older ones lying around. Sounds admirable, right?
It would be admirable if Apple Inc. hadn’t hit a complete 180 on their core goal of ecological sustenance.
Apple claims that this EU Commission legislation, if passed, would stifle innovation in the industry, for some reason. Apparently, for Apple, worrying about the environment is a priority only as long as their business interests are met.
The EU says that consumers spend around 2.4 billion Euros annually on chargers sold separately, and you can be damn sure that at least a half of that amount last year went towards buying new Lightning connectors for Apple devices. The irony seems to be completely lost here.
It’s also not like Apple is completely incapable of working with the USB-C standard either, considering the fact that most of their non-iPhone and non-iPad products come with fully functional USB-C ports, which are used to interface with most USB-C accessories on the market. From the looks of it, the only reason Lightning connectors exist today, is because it is the proprietary electronic interface owned by Apple. If Apple can slap the (arguably) inferior Lightning connector on all of their devices, and their ancillary accessories, they can essentially lock their users into a self-contained hardware ecosystem, even if the users had no intention of buying in. If users want to use accessories with USB-C connectors, well, they can always purchase another overpriced and clunky Lightning to USB-C connector, and add on more electronic waste to the massive existing pile.
The irony here isn’t just that Apple have seemingly abandoned their admirable goal of reducing e-waste, it is the fact that the e-waste problem exists because of a company like Apple rendering global standard chargers unusable for their own products. If there really was a concern about global accumulation of e-waste, new iPhones would have dropped in prices (to compensate for the lack of wall chargers), and the Apple marketing machine would have definitely let us know about it. However, nothing substantial like this has happened.
As much as Apple can virtue-signal and lament about increasing e-waste, and about their ecological concerns, they have done more to create these problems than to solve them.
Always leave it to Apple to create a massive problem, profit off of it, and market the solution like they didn’t have anything to do with the problem in the first place.
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