> micro-USB is a legally defined requirement for device charging in some areas
Where? Wouldn't this outlaw iPhones?
Where? Wouldn't this outlaw iPhones?
Obviously 'voluntary' here deserves some scare quotes since the EU had made it very clear that it was willing to swing its sledgehammer and formally regulate if the manufacturers couldn't agree on a standard amongst themselves. Which would have been less good for everyone (including the EU), e.g. since formal legal regulations are a lot harder to change with the times, So they were pretty incentivized to work something out, and happily they did.
One really good EU standardization effort which actually worked except for Apple.
The main point was to facilitate that chargers could be reused, rather than fill up drawers and landfills.
Except for Apple, which doesn't offer any low-margin phone and thus can still use their custom charger and bundle an adapter.
Thus the charger can be reused on a different device with a simple change of cable (a different story is that Apple has their own way of signaling max As to the device).
Still, it's kind of sad you can't buy an iPhone and plug it into your new MBP
Not perfect by far, but better than it used to be before EU started to tell phone manufacturers to wisen up.
It’s easy to forget how crazy bad things used to be before the EU mandated a standardization.