Playing devil’s advocate here. When chatting with Android phones the Messages app on the iPhone can’t use the iMessages protocol and therefor has to fallback to the SMS protocol so features like group chats, sharing large media files, and read receipts won’t work as well. To a typical iPhone user “texting” with Android users does actually feel broken to them.
But I think it is mostly just a socially acceptable form of classism. The typical iPhone user will assume that the Android user’s phone is too cheap and not sophisticated enough to support “texting” properly while the reality is that iPhone users don’t realise they are vendor-locked into a proprietary network when they are “texting” each other.
Adam Smith described how a market would behave if it was a free market. He understood that businesses would tend to collude to try to avoid having a free market. He was onboard with governments interfering to stop collusion. I can’t immediately spot whether he supported governments imposing technical standards such as this case of USB chargers. But to me, proprietary chargers are clearly an impediment to the free market, so I think it’s plausible to suggest he’d be OK with it.
No argument here - just reporting my own observations. I’ve only used Android phones and I have had lots of issues communicating with my iPhone using friends. Recently a friend (who can’t receive texts from me when he’s at his home which is out of cell coverage), was surprised that I could receive and send texts through the application that I use for texting (Signal - which successfully bridges SMS and network traffic) while at his place, (connected via wifi).
I don’t think vendor lock-in is something that should be considered acceptable by freedom loving peoples, (remember the “1984” commercial). Open standards are what create vibrant industries - e.g. TCP/IP, html, MIDI, ASCII, FCC allocation of spectrum (allowing different makers of radios and televisions to receive the same broadcasts) - protocols that allow companies to build products that interoperate on a common basis are fertile grounds for competition and ultimately more beneficial to the general population.
If I seem a little grouchy on this topic it’s because I am - having been one of those weird kids who was fascinated by telecom technology when it was still largely analog based, (at least at the local exchange level), and bearing witness to the debasement of the telephone experience in the current era. Cell phones have never attained the ability to create a sense of human presence that the landline networks were able to achieve then. (Remember “You can hear a pin drop” Sprints ad campaign in the 90’s (if you were in the U.S.), in those days the state of the art digital long distance call fidelity was so much greater than on cell connections of today - the latency and bandwidth and weird effects due to overly aggressive companding/signal processing makes the telepresence, the psychic “shared space” effect so poor that people mostly don’t bother with voice calls much, and now “texting” has been carved up into various random corporately controlled enclaves, whether iMessage, Messanger, WhatsApp, WeChat etc.). Society as a while is going through a massive upheaval due to the shifts incurred from network technologies, I’d like to think that we can do better by taking more care of our infrastructure and the institutional knowledge that it embodies - when civil infrastructure is neglected bridges collapse, when information infrastructure is neglected we get game-show host wannabe dictator presidents and horse parasite disinfo pandmenics.
I also don’t know, but I’ve gotten those frustrated vibes from iPhone folks as well, that’s the lens I was reading that verge article through - that it benefits Apple to allow their users to develop a sense of frustration at poor interoperability when the perception is that it is due to the non-iPhone parties seemingly lacking tech.
Network effect: a bolt that can work with multiple nuts is worth more than a bolt that can only work with one nut. Likewise a nut that can work with multiple bolts is worth more than a nut that can only work with one.
In a Smithian market there are no monopoly rents, by definition. In what passes for a market today rents dominate. Obviously, to a customer the only value of profits is that their suppliers will go out of business without them, so they are in effect a cost comparable to labor. In fact, to a Smithian business profits are basically the labor cost paid to the proprietor, to be reduced as necessary to remain competitive.
Doesn’t sound very much like the “free market” of today, does it?
I think you’re right to target your ire at telecoms dropping the ball. When Apple first launched the iPhone a lot of the things they did and fought for should have been in place years before. The UI for merging calls or putting people on hold, visual voicemail, etc. Part of that was touchscreens but most of it was laziness and greediness.
iMessages didn’t come along until 4-5 years later. Text messages weren’t unlimited and MMS messages were limited in size. Today you still see “text messaging rates apply.” You still can’t do things like remove yourself from group messages. Whenever I asked about reaching people overseas I get “Do they all have iPhones? FaceTime and iMessage. No? WeChat, WhatsApp, or whatever you can convince them to sign up for.” I guess you can blame Apple for not making these an open standard, but today there aren’t great open alternatives. I’d like to think if it weren’t for patent trolls FaceTime would be open.
A few months ago I was flying to a different country. The hotel I was staying at said, “oh, we just text you instructions the day you check in.” Great. Can I accept a foreign text message? Will I get it when I’m in that country? How much will that cost?
You phone plan includes international text messages? My service with a couple different US carriers didn’t. We had friends a few hours drive in Canada and needed a $5/mo add on to call/text. My experience when driving over the border is just losing service a dozen miles after crossing. I can’t remember exactly if text messages explicitly fail or silently disappear and never get received.
I usually don’t trust my phone to talk to international towers unless I explicitly check beforehand. I’m happy to sip off wifi or buy a local sim because I don’t really trust telecom companies. I usually completely disable cellular. I haven’t seen roaming data in years (not that I deal with this often). Companies prefer to just cut you off in my experience.
Based on the proposal it seems like USB-PD is implied: (from page 10 of the proposal here)
New Annex (Part I): It requires that mobiles phones and the similar radio devices, if
they are capable to be recharged via wired charging, are equipped with the USB
Type-C receptacle and, if they also require charging at voltages higher than 5 volts or
currents higher than 3 amperes or powers higher than 15 watts , incorporate the USB
Power Delivery charging communication protocol.
I don’t doubt that there will still be room for vendor fuckery; “Ensuring a safe and reliable consumer experience just requires that our power management IC be vigilant in refusing to work with substandard chargers; why do you love electrical fires?”; and USB-PD is a pig of a spec with some notably subpar implementations(not all as good as the cables that kill devices if you use them, though those are an exciting option; but all kinds of weirdness); but it’s pretty clear that either you use the old-reliable of 5v and as much current as you can coax out of the source; or you use USB-PD.
Qualcomm will probably be a bit peevish, the “voltages higher than 5 volts” bit excludes basically all of their pet “Quick Charge” stuff, unless operating in 5v compatibility mode(for the erlier QC versions) or PD compatibility mode (for at least v4, and presumably v5).
It is my unpleasant duty to assist with phone management at work; and the Service Suprise that really knocks people for a loop is getting in range of a cruise ship’s cell tower if you are sufficiently close to the port and the local RF witchery causes your phone to consider roaming to it to be the best option.
We have a pretty decent corporate account, so a lot of roaming to countries our staff commonly visit is fine; but the shipboard networks don’t really do polite cooperation regarding data rates; both because they have satellite backhaul to pay for when at sea; and because cruise ships are full of the intoxicated and cost insensitive so why not go high?
Luckily it happens infrequently enough that our rep will sometimes just comp it just in the spirit of not having us thinking of that time a C-level managed to spend ~$1000 doing some perfectly pedestrian normal phone data stuff at a harborside hotel or restaurant.
That’s the part I was refering to. There has been discussion about if USB-PD precludes Qualcom’s QC tech. Generally the answer has been ‘yes’ as it requires messaging that is a violation of the USB-PD spec. It’s not exploting any ambiguity or anything, it’s completely in violation. So, if they do try anything, it’s possible they could get fined by the various EU countries.
The same goes for crappy cables and dodgy chargers. Also for broken devices like the Rasperry Pi4B which wouldn’t work with high current cables because they cheaped out and used one termination/sense resistor instead of two. I think the possiblity of getting sued or fined for poor USB-PD implementation will help clean up a lot of ‘iffy’ practices that have been going on.
I don’t get Apple’s complaint in this. They already use USB-C w/PD for their laptops, the Pro iPad line (for like the last 3 generations), iPad Air, and the mini just went USB-C. IIRC the only devices not on USB-C are their phones and the base model iPad. I’m guessing they don’t want to change the base iPad because of schools having huge collections of lightning charging setups, but the phones? They don’t even include a charger in the box any more, so they? So, it’s up to the user to buy something. I guess they assume they’ll reuse an older charger because of course they’ve been locked into the ecosystem already.
Qualcom and others who have been coming up with more and more crazy ways to fast charge over USB-C have had plenty of time to move to USB-PD. If there are any costs to them in having to do so to comply with these laws, then that’s just too damn bad. You have been in volation of the spec for years and that has hurt consumers. I’m glad the EU is doing this because I hope it cleans up all this crazy phone charger nonsense. I’ve had to buy silly chargers for the QC and Warp phones I’ve owned. I would be much happier with one charger to rule them all. It doesn’t bother me that it’s USB-PC, either. As you point out, the spec is pretty complex, but it’s also very flexable in what you are required to implement. For phone level chargers, the difference between a QC charger and a PD charger is just a matter of the code in the controller chip. For higher levels it gets more complex, but for 240W I want more safety in my charger!
I recently purchased a new Chromebook and it came with a USB-C/PD charger (45W). I really like that I can unplug my laptop and plug in my phone (OnePlus 8) and charge it with the same setup. That’s super handy. My phone can’t do its propriatary Warp charging, but I really don’t want that level of battery abuse. The 15W it gets through PD (5V/3A) is plenty for the little battery in the phone. Maybe it’s my lifestyle, but I don’t see much use for a super fast charger. My phone lasts all day (rarely even goes down to 50%) and it has all night to charge. I use a cheap 5V/1A charger for it so that the battery doesn’t get stressed by charging. After all, it’s got 8 hours, take your time little phone.
The expected result is that the people living in the bloc will colletively save €250m annually on unnecesary charger purchases, and this is projected to reduce e-waste by almost a thousand tonnes per year.
