I'm not sure they're complying even with the letter of the law. Many cookie banners I see, require several clicks to deny anything but those they don't have to ask me about. And in most other cases, the accept button is significantly more visible than the deny one.

If that's actually allowed, yeah, bad law. If it's not… well I guess we can hope prosecutors will prosecute. Though I'm afraid we won't get much more than hope…

I'd say it was bad legislation because this was a foreseeable outcome. I actually worked on cookie banners, and we did user testing, a full 80% of people closed it before reading single word and thought it was an ad.

This type of ambush agree to XYZ or you can't come in that we see with EULA's and privacy polices is unfair, just like if some scammer demanded people sign a fifty page contract before they enter the supermarket. This is something people understand intuitively.

It was foreseeable, and the end result is very little has changed as far as consumer privacy. Most people just agree to get the box to go away, if you actually want privacy your best bet is still a private browsing session and a VPN.

Why does the EU Commission site have cookie banners then?

https://commission.europa.eu

Malicious compliance?

It was bad legislation because it didn't achieve anything except make visiting websites more annoying.

I don't care what the politicians intended. The outcome is no improvement in privacy but more annoying banners.

I've come to realize (I think) that this actually does have a lot to do with waterproofness ratings -- a legibility trap.

I notice that Fairphone excludes headphones from their latest devices, and attributes it to the necessary of doing so in order to get an "IP55" rating.

I'm not sure if that ultimately makes sense (and suspect that it... doesn't), but the legibility trap of that ratings system might actually be part of the cause of the current market absence of a feature so many people still talk about after years of its unavailability.

Phones back then were definitely not as durable as modern ones. Whether you like it or not, it's easier to waterproof a completely insulated system.

Every phone should have a SCSI port with an included terminator in the box.

When a product becomes as complex as a cell phone it's not as easy as saying "just get one that doesn't have ${thing}" as no product has the right combination of everything for everyone but people may agree every product should have something (whether it be for safety, environmental, buyer protection, or convenience reasons). Once most folks agree that's the case, it's about "where do you draw the line" rather than "does it make sense to require ${thing} in isolation when there are already options with ${thing}".

Your link is from 2020 and does not say Apple was moving to USB C, just that the industry was. By 2022 the law requiring it had already passed, so it would make sense they were planning on doing it at that point. Regardless, a few years would be a lot of impact for a market where over 100 million phones are sold annually.

> Everyone moving to USB-C was the same standard, though; now you can use the same charger with your phone, laptop, tablet, other random gadgets, etc.

You could already use the same charger with nearly everything. It was the cables that were not necessarily USB on the device end.

Apple for example as far as I can tell has used USB chargers for everything (phones, tablets, music players, headphones, Apple TV remote) except laptops since sometime in 2012. For laptops everything introduced after the last MagSafe 2 laptop in mid 2017 has used a USB charger.

> if you can't find a replacement battery for that exact model.

Usually there are compatible ones that still give you some juice for 1-2 years at a small fraction of the price (of the original one).

If you worry about that, you can always buy an "official" battery in advance to be used 4-5 years later.

What exactly is your specific annoyance?