> You didn't say why this is a bad solution.

The fear is that regulations ossify industries and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years. If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable? And for what, so people don't have to have multiple cables? That's not even in the top 100 problems that a government body as large as the EU should be concerned about.

> Whenever government regulates things to benefit people, people tend to benefit.

Healthcare, education, transportation, and housing would all be counterexamples depending on how you want to frame "benefit."

> It seems like the Macbook Neo has a lot of those properties as well for a very inexpensive device that is extremely easy to repair.

This is counter to your point, no one regulated that Apple make the MacBook Neo easy to repair. Apple is incentivized to follow the market.

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Tade0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> If you mandate that all electronic devices must have USB-C cables, how can anyone invent something better than a USB-C cable?

That already happened with Micro USB. The EU initially mandated that manufacturers agree on a standard socket, because the absolute zoo of charging ports back then was counter-productive and only generated e-waste. Ultimately they agreed to use Micro USB, but obviously that's not what's used today.

These regulations are not just dumped on the manufacturers - there's a period of consultation and a grace period to implement them. If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.

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spaqin 2 days ago | parent [-]

> If something actually better came up, you'd eventually see it mandated.

While I generally am quite content with that particular mandate and it does more good than bad, I would have to disagree on this. Something better doesn't come from nowhere - hell, USB itself has gone through a long and arduous path until it came to the (messy) standard it is today. This is essentially banning any other standard to grow and be improved upon with feedback and iteration.

	▲	Tade0 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't believe other paths would yield better results. It took Apple a looong time to adapt USB-C, which was already running circles around Lightning five years after the introduction of the latter. Ironically Apple participated in the development of the standard. They just couldn't be arsed to implement it. Multinationals don't do anything unless they absolutely have to. Apple notably all but threatened to move out of the EU due to USB-C regulations. They were actively preventing their users from having a better standard because it hurt their bottom line in the field of accessories.

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hananova 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The argument about ossified connectors is obviously made in bad faith, since it obviously didn’t happen. USB-C isn’t the first mandated connector, that was micro-usb. And when the time came to upgrade, the mandate was changed. None of that imagined ossification happened back then, and it won’t happen when we go from USB-C to USB-D or whatever.

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swiftcoder 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years

Wut?

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mattstir 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> and that's why heavily regulated industries like healthcare, education, and transportation have seen basically no innovation in 50 years.

Not to get distracted, but aren't these three all incredible examples of innovation over time? Healthcare alone is significantly better than it was 50 years ago and it's not really close. 50 years ago, this hip new treatment called electroshock therapy was being used to "treat" being gay. It was also within touching distance of getting a lobotomy for depression or anything else your husband thought was a problem.

	▲	an0malous 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		The rates of depression in the US are at an all time high [1]. The primary theory behind the cause of depression and mechanism of most antidepressants has been abandoned [2]. Not treating homosexuality as a disease isn't an innovation, it's a cultural change. You could maybe argue mRNA vaccines or semaglutides are big innovations, I think we've made a ton of progress against HIV, and it seems like we've made progress against cancer, but when you factor in how much government money goes into this research and compare it against the advancements we've seen in computational technology it's a lot less impressive. You could buy a raspberry pi for like $50 today that outperforms every computer made 50 years ago, whereas the cost of most medical imaging has actually increased [3]. Likewise the inflation adjusted cost of college degrees and building new rail lines or really any infrastructure has increased precipitously since 1970. 1. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/releases/20250416.html 2. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jul/no-evidence-depression-c... 3. https://www.jacr.org/article/S1546-1440%2822%2900710-4/fullt...

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flir 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Healthcare? Maybe you distinguish that from medicine somehow, but I'd rather have [literally any disease] today than fifty years ago.