Apple: 'We'll Have to Comply' to EU USB-C Mandate, 'We Have No Choice'

Apple has officially addressed the European Union's USB-C mandate, saying 'We'll have to comply, we have no choice.' This means that the next generation iPhone will likely get a USB-C port, unless the company decides to move right to a portless device.

On Monday, the European Union announced final approval of its common charger directive forcing Apple and other manufacturers to switch to using USB-C by the end of 2024. Apple SVP Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak discussed the mandate in a recent interview with the WSJ's Joanna Stern.




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Stern: Is Apple moving to USB-C?

Joswiak: Well, maybe I can step back a bit.

You've probably heard me say for years that I don't mind governments telling us what they want to accomplish but usually we've got some pretty smart engineers to figure out the best ways to accomplish them technically.

An example of that, that I love to give is for years and years mobile phones had to satisfy hearing aid compatibility spec, very prescriptively described by regulation that said here is what you have to do to be compatible with hearing aids. The problem is, it didn't work, but all of us had to do it. So we came up with a new way of doing hearing aids, Made for iPhone Hearing Aids, actually made it an industry standard, that actually worked. So what we were accomplishing is what the government actually wanted, to have hearing impaired people being able to use phones but we did it in a way that worked better.


We've been in an argument over this one for well over ten years. Over ten years ago, the push from the EU, look they're well meaning, I get the fact that they want to accomplish some good things, was to do micro-USB and standardize as a micro-USB. If we have standardized micro-USB that chart doesn't exist. Right, neither of those happen. So we have been in this little bit of a disagreement, but part of what they wanted to accomplish is why should people have all these different power adapters. So, we got to what we think was a better place, which was power adapters that had detachable cables, all of them USB-A or USB-C, largely moving to USB-C, but you choose the cable you know that was appropriate for your device, whether that was one of ours or somebody else's. What that allowed you to do is have over a billion people, it's not a small number of people that have that connector on the left, to be able to use what they have already and not have to be disrupted by that, and cause a bunch of e-waste as well. I mean because what are you going to do with these cables over time, if they are no longer useful. Again, billions of them because everyone has more than one cable. And so we preferred that path, governments you know, get to do what they are going to do.

Obviously, we'll have to comply, we have no choice, as we do around the world to comply to local laws but we think the approach would have been better environmentally and better for our customers to not have a government be that prescriptive.
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You can watch the full interview below...