EU’s Fight for Common Charger Accessories
According to reports from Europe, members of the European Parliament have begun to discuss measures that would require any sellers of smartphones in Europe to make a universal charging port that fits all of their devices. This development, if voted through, would severely affect Apple products, who have relied extensively on the Lightning Port since 2012.
The motion was inspired as a movement to decrease electronic waste, which reportedly includes somewhere up to 51,000 tons of old chargers. So having chargers and cords that match would allow for people to own one cord and use it across all of their devices.
Apple has pushed back on this for years, arguing that it would ‘freeze innovation rather than encourage it,” as well as being “bad for the environment and unnecessarily disruptive for customers” considering that “More than one billion Apple devices have shipped using a Lightning connector in addition to an entire ecosystem of accessory and device manufacturers who use Lightning to serve our collective customers.” It would severely disrupt the state of Apple devices on a global scale.