Has Apple taken too long to warm up to the USB-C charging port?
iPhone speaker dock I was given by my mum the previous Christmas is blasting out Carly Rae Jepson’s Call Me Maybe which, unlike most of the other hits that year, would come to stand the test of time quite perfectly.
Less enduring would be the 30-pin Apple charger that made such a fine technological feat possible. That year would see it ditched; replaced in the iPhone 5 with the 8-pin, 80% smaller Lightning connector we all recognize today.
Just like that, millions of peripherals and accessories were rendered obsolete.
Now Apple is set to do it again. The iPhone 15, due to be unveiled Tuesday, is expected to be the first Apple smartphone to make use of the already widely adopted USB-C.
Finally.
This isn’t because Apple has chosen to, as the company might frame it duringTuesday’s presentation, but because it has to: New European Union legislation set an end-of-2024 deadline for all new smartphones to use USB-C for wired charging. Apple is complying by rolling it out everywhere.
We can be glad that we’ve reached an end result that is better for consumers and the environment.
Unused and discarded chargers account for about 11,000 metric tons of e-waste a year. But it would have been much better for Apple to have made this move of its own volition — the era of forcing consumers to use a proprietary charger is years past its sell-by date.
Apple previously argued that the switch will make things worse, forcing millions of consumers to throw out their existing iPhone charging cables and accessories.
This is an issue Apple seemed less concerned about when, in 2012, executive Phil Schiller eagerly introduced Lightning as “a modern connector for the next decade,” one tailored for a new age in which more was done wirelessly thanks
