The EU threatening manufacturers with regulation unless they settled on a format led to the end of different chargers for every phone model. It definitely had a direct impact on my life. Getting rid of different cables as well will make me very happy.
"The EU" is not a singular entity. The tiny little parts of the EU doing most of the work on this combined with the tiny amount of time spent by larger parts of the EU seems well worth it to me.
The EU = the EU Commission. Aren't there much bigger issues impacting consumers such as right to repair, planned obsolescence, clean energy etc.? The law will not take effect until 2024, and in the meantime the industry has largely moved toward USB-C / wireless charging.
The EU Commission is still not a singular entity. The commissioners are not the ones doing the underlying work on these things, and so many things happens in parallel.
This was part of the EU Commission's 2020 work programme as one small sub-point among well over a hundred under one of the 43 main goals, as a secondary priority after a long list of climate and economic changes.
You're of course free to disagree with their prioritisation, but this has hardly been a major part of the Commissions work.
> The law will not take effect until 2024, and in the meantime the industry has largely moved toward USB-C / wireless charging.
Even with respect to mobile phones this excludes a certain notable holdout that accounts for a large proportion of the market, and which have kept resisting the EU push for over a decade, and a number of smaller holdouts still sticking with micro-USB.
But you'll note this extends way past phones, including to laptops where there's still a mess of different chargers.
With respect to wireless charging, it makes little difference as long as long as most people still have cables as backup (indeed I've yet to see someone use wireless charging; I'm sure a few more uses it at home, but I for one have zero devices capable of wireless charging; it will not reduce waste anytime soon)
I know for my own use, unnecessary cables and chargers still account for a large proportion of my electric waste because of the frequency of replacement, so for my part I welcome this.
"The EU" is not a singular entity. The tiny little parts of the EU doing most of the work on this combined with the tiny amount of time spent by larger parts of the EU seems well worth it to me.