iPhone will have Usb-C instead of Lightning to adapt to the “single charger” requested by the EU. Apple: “We have no choice”

IPhone will also have the Usb-C port. After years in which we loaded it with Lightning, Apple’s proprietary port, now even the Apple smartphone takes a step back and the confirmation comes from senior vice president of marketing, Greg Joswiak. “Obviously we will have to adapt, we have no choice,” she told al Wall Street Journalconfirming a decision that is actually an obligation.

The single shipper of the European Union

After years of work, on October 26 the EU member states gave the final go-ahead to the ‘universal charger’ directive: by the autumn of 2024, all portable devices sold in Europe will have to adopt USB-C and the charging protocols will have to be interoperable between the products of the different companies in order to allow the user to use one charger and only one cable.

The standard, which concerns smartphones, tablets, e-readers, headsets, cameras and portable consoles (for laptops there will be another 16 months) already sees most of the manufacturers aligned but not Apple, which has waited until the last. The iPhone 14 presented in September (here the video test) still have the Lightning while the iPad released a few days, the tenth generation one (here our test), has the Usb-C. So, smartphones aside, the other Apple devices still with Lightning are all AirPods and the 9th generation iPad (which we tested here).

Apple’s response: “prescriptive governments”

«We think the approach would have been better from an environmental point of view and for our customers if governments weren’t so prescriptive», Said Joswiak without defining a certain date for the passage,« Europe is dictating the times for European customers ».

In the name of nature

In the intentions of the EU, the directive should electronic waste but some doubts about its effectiveness remain. «The agreement is a fundamental step after more than 10 years of work on this directive – says Alex Agius Saliba, Maltese Socialist MEP and rapporteur for the European Parliament on the directive -. Thanks to the norm they will be spared over 250 million euros spent by consumers on useless chargers “which generate”between 13 and 15 thousand tons of electronic waste ».

And here are the doubts. As we said, the single port is not a problem, many devices already have the Usb-C, but the same charger and the same charging cable in reality. they cannot be used on all devices. Let’s take an example: the charger of a 20 Watt smartphone can also recharge a camera or an ebook reader but certainly not a laptop, which needs more Watts. And if the smartphone has a fast charge, we will need another charger of, say, 40 Watts (The Realme Gt Neo 3 smartphone, for example, has a 150 Watt charger)

Also cables then they are not the same. At first glance we see that they have the USB-C connector on both ends but in reality they are different. Some carry more Watts than others or a larger amount of data. So if you buy a newer or more powerful device, we will probably also need to buy a new charger and a new, better performing cable.

The limits of the directive

The criticism that comes from many quarters is that the European Union should have posed gods minimum wattage limits to chargers so as to have on the market products compatible with most devices and already future-proof. For example, imposing at least 60 Watts peak would have allowed for chargers capable of charging most of the devices on the market.