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Comment by gizmo | Hacker News Reader

A 4 year old iPhone still works perfectly, but a $200 Android will find its way to a landfill way sooner. As a rule of thumb, appliances that last are better for the environment than cheap products. Apple is good at make devices that last.

Nowadays all laptops can charge over usb-c (including Apple laptops, mind you!). Did anybody have to force Apple to do this? No, because charging technology improved so much that what used to be a big brick is now a pocketable GAN charger. Even the new magsafe laptops still support usb-c charging. And iPhones support wireless qi charging as well as Apple's proprietary magnet based wireless charging solution. Thanks to cheaper chips all devices can now negotiate how much power they need from the power brick. That's a big win, and this just wasn't possible a decade ago.

We're in the final stretch of a 20 year trend towards universal chargers, and this EU mandate is totally unnecessary.

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> A 4 year old iPhone still works perfectly, but a $200 Android will find its way to a landfill way sooner

Not really, though. I'm using one and it's just fine. Nonsense aside...

> Nowadays all laptops can charge over usb-c (including Apple laptops, mind you!). Did anybody have to force Apple to do this? No

Yes. That's what the EU has been doing by talking about forcing the standardization. Dollars to donuts that apple would still be on their proprietary connector if not for that.

> this EU mandate is totally unnecessary

Disagree. Just look at the iPhones apple is still manufacturing, which they'll now be forced to change.

Android uses RAM as planned obselesence when they stop giving security updates to your old OS. The updated OS always uses more RAM and slows the phone down because of swapping to disk

I don't know that any stock Android swaps to disk. They swap to zram, generally.

That said, the thing that seems to make old Android devices obsolete is Google Play Services. It takes up significantly more RAM over time, and it keeps getting updated even when your OS isn't. A degoogled older Android device stays about as useful as it ever was.

Remove google from your android and you can keep it years. Mine is from 2017.

Why has apple bucked this 20 year trend for iPhone charging? Much progress has been made, but never at this place. For a long time, it has looked like they will, but they never did. The EU finally got impatient and decided this mandate was needed to get apple to do this.

Note that the threat of a law like this is what caused many other manufacturers to standardize. If Apple gets a pass, what does that signal to the manufacturers who caved, and to everyone else. I would wager it tells them "the eu makes empty threats". This was the result of Apple saying "bluff" to EU demands, and the EU deciding to follow through.

Apple could have prevented this. The EU sort of had its hands bound when it started the process of pushing everyone to one charging. That process was largely very valuable, for apple specifically it isn't that important. But leaving the process incomplete would send the wrong message. Hence I think that Apple is at fault for this regrettable law as the EU is.

This is a bad law that is the result of a process that was, on balance, still very valuable. This law is a small element in the minus column, that does not weigh against the many elements in the plus column. The process I refer to is the EU push to get manufactures to use the same charging port.

> We're in the final stretch of a 20 year trend towards universal chargers, and this EU mandate is totally unnecessary.

Did you forget it was the EU that asked phone producers to standardize (on USB-micro)?

We'd still have one charger per producer without that, since there was no critical mass to adopt one connector or the other.

Anecdotal, but my friend has been complaining for over a year that the updates are making his iPhone too slow. Otoh, my 6+ year old Android phone is still going strong (after 1 battery replacement).

Your friend's iPhone will go a lot faster after he also gets his battery replaced. Once the battery degrades too much the iPhone slows itself down in order to not crash by trying to use more power than the battery can provide.

>A 4 year old iPhone still works perfectly, but a $200 Android will find its way to a landfill way sooner. As a rule of thumb, appliances that last are better for the environment than cheap products. Apple is good at make devices that last.

Got any source for that?

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