Just curious, what happens when USB C gets outdated and needs to be replaced?
This is done through the USB Implementers Forum. All this law really, truly does is force manufacturers to sit around a table and work out a single solution for the whole electronics market. EU doesn't really care about USB-C or USB-D or USB-Whatever, they just require industry to set aside pettiness and work out a solution.
The problem isn't "the industry" being petty, it's Apple, and Apple alone. Everyone else got over their idiotic pettiness and attempts at proprietary connectors many, many years ago and jumped on the USB bandwagon.
The interoperability between radio equipment and accessories such as chargers is hampered as there are different charging interfaces for certain categories or classes of radio equipment that use wired charging such as handheld mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones or headsets, handheld videogame consoles, portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops.
It basically applies to anything that is portable (but not so small that it can’t fit a USB-C socket), battery powered, and has some sort of radio in it. For example, this is presumably why the new Kindle now has USB-C.[2]
[1] https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-10713-2022-...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/23409106/amazon-kindle-2022-e-reade...
Apple's lightning connector was simply better than what others offered. They had a data connector that worked upside down. They solved an annoyance users had, which is why the thing was so popular. It then took other cell phone manufacturers three years to implement that.
No one can put a new device on the market without first getting approval from the USB-IF. It means that companies for which the only thing that matters is the fractions of a cent they can save on the production have much more control over the entire industry.
It also means that no one can put a product out that requires _anything_ beyond what the current connector can do, because step 1 is going to the IF and detailing what you are planning to do in a future product, and then wait while your competitors implement your feature and get to ship at the same time as you.
(I don't know exactly "how" in this case)
Also it's extremely unlikely we'll need that for decades. USB-C as a connector supports absurd bandwidth and power. If you can pull 120W and drive 2x 4k displays from your phone... what would be the reason for the next upgrade? (and those are likely not the physical limits yet)
It’s not like the (mostly) unified electric plug has been keeping us from innovation, let’s be realistic here, electricity flowing through a cable won’t change any time soon as the basis for most of our infrastructure, even from a simple physical point of view. Also, wireless charging is not affected, but that will always be less efficient, at least in the foreseeable future.
What if someone comes up with something just better, and doesn't want to deal with the cruft and backward compatibility requirements of USB?
Nowadays only one brand is against interoperability.
This is because they wanted you to be able to connect a computer to a camera, but also to be able to connect that camera to a printer.
IMHO it really is. For the first releases of power delivery, the IF decided to _not_ go with Apple's existing system that they developed to negotiate charging levels for iPods, iPhones and iPads. Instead they standardized another new, incompatible mechanism.
If you ever wondered why so many Apple devices and cables don't have USB logos, it is because they were left with little way to be compliant with PD 1.0 and still support literally a billion previously shipped devices and chargers at the time.
This caused a market with incompatibilities between Android and iDevice charging ecosystems, which (again IMHO) was what caused the last round of EU mandates in the first place. Qualcomm and others capitalized on various gaps with their own proprietary charging protocols, which then created a need for their chips in chargers as well.
Things really didn't even start to get fixed until rather recently, with Power Delivery 3.0 and PPS.
For slow to medium data, USB 2.0 is baked in to so many chips that it's hard to imagine wanting anything else.
For fast data, maybe you want a new port in some situations, but does that also have to be your only charging port?
Have you ever looked at the horror that is USB-PD? The reason you've never seen v1 devices in the real world is because the spec was impossible to implement so they had to fix it in a v2.
"Tiny" probably isn't the best word but it's straightforward enough. It can be put into tiny chips.
Compare with PCIe, which is actually sane.
People don't really need that much data transfer speed with their phones, and we already have the technology to push 80 Gb/s via USB-C. Apple has gotten by by selling sub-0.5 Gb/s for a decade. And I'd expect us to hit a couple more speed records still before we actually outgrow the physical USB-C connector.
We're also pushing up to 240 watts through the USB-C connector, so the charging side (the one that people care much more about) also seems fine for the USB-C connector.
Just ask South Korea how their IE law went :-/
In this case the EU has aligned with an existing industry standard, and has said that they expect the standard to develop over time.