The Apple Lightening cable may soon be pulled from production following a proposed change to European law.
Apple has long used their own connection cables for their range of devices; mac, iPhone and iPad to name but a few.
The cables are used to both charge and to sync the devices with other products, such as your home PC.
This has been fine up till now, as members of the European Parliament have now urged the European Commission to force all tech giants to unite and adopt a single universal cable for charging and syncing.
Apple have already started to do this with the 2018 iPad pro, which now uses USB-C, and customers were quite surprised when this was available on the new iPhone last year.
Most Android devices already have adopted USB-C or micro-USB as a means of syncing and charging, it is just Apple who haven’t adopted this as their primary means.
“Stifle innovation and be disruptive to consumers”, this is what Apple claim will happen if the proposed changes go ahead, there has been no date given to when the Commission will discuss the new regulation.
However, if this decision were to be made by the European Commission all devices in Europe would need to conform, therefore it is unlikely they would not follow suit in the US and worldwide to reduce production costs, therefore USB-C would become the norm.
The alternate option for Apple as minimalism is very much their style, would be to do away with the port all together and rather adopt the wireless charging, which many of today’s devices are capable anyway.
This argument has not just surfaced overnight, the European Commission has actually been campaigning for a single charging method for devices for over a decade.
Back in 2009 30 different charging cables were available, finally whittling down to the 3 we have today.
The principal reason for the change is not profiteering, but the waste created by the obsolete cables, which is estimated at 51,000 tonnes per year.
