The EU recently announced legislation that is designed to facilitate interoperability between tech devices. It legislates that all consumer technology devices in the EU need to have USB Type-C charging ports. As the EU represents such a huge market for consumer technology devices, this basically means that manufacturers everywhere have to follow this rule, unless they want to make different devices for different regions. As this new rule will mostly affect Apple and its proprietary Lightning Cable, we’ve all been waiting to hear the company’s response and it now looks like we have one.
Greg Joswiak, who is Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing recently gave an interview with The Wall Street Journal in which he discussed the new EU regulation.
In the interview, Joswiak stated that Apple will obviously have to comply with the new EU law and introduce USB-C charging ports into its devices such as iPhones and iPads. However, he was also very cagey about when Apple will start complying with it and he also refused to comment on where Apple will be shipping out new USB-C iPhones, leaving the door open to a future that has two distinct iPhone models that use different charging cables. You can check out the interview below:
Joswiak’s caginess means that we don’t know whether the next version of the iPhone, the iPhone 15, will have the new USB-C charging ports as it will launch before the new law comes into effect or if users will have to wait until the iPhone 16 for the universal charging ports.
However, despite Joswiak’s hesitation to be drawn into the debate about where these new iPhones will roll out, it is highly likely that Apple won’t be segmenting manufacturing and shipping out different versions of the iPhone. Apple clearly doesn’t have a problem with USB-C as all new Macbooks are rolling out with USB-C ports. As is usually the case with these big tech companies, they just don’t like being told what to do. It most likely then, is just a case of when they will roll out everywhere.
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