Wiredfire

Depends on how we define “best”. USB-C has the same weakness of micro USB of having “tongue” in the port. This is poor design and leaves ports prone to failure of this tongue gets damaged. I’ve seen this happen more than once with either from folk aggressively jamming charger cables in slightly misaligned or just wear & tear. Lightening on the other hand is a much more robust port design. The “tongue” is the cable with a hollow port. 1st party lightening cables are pure trash, which is itself a ewaste matter, but we’re talking port design.

Now every other aspect of lightening is inferior to USB 3 (important to note USB-C ≠ USB 3) , but by my needs it’s the “better” connector.

I don’t see how USB-C is objectively better at the charger end, unless we’re meaning the reversible nature at both ends which is… it’s good but it’s not “wow” (and neither is it “wow” with lightening).

I’m happy to be proven wrong, and I’m not going to get pissy if in 3-4 years my next phone is an iPhone with USB-C, it’s just the merits seem over-egged and I’d wager for the average, non-technical, user the benefits are minimal and potentially cause some minor confusions.

So fun and games all round for those guys >_<

While I agree, Reddit really is learning “fuck around and find out” the hard way from all sorts of angles. They must be in perpetual crisis mode. Which sucks for the actual staffers, of course

No. USB was on the Android side, split between Mini/Micro/C connectors on the phone side and USB-A on the brick side. There were a gazillion fast charging standards so that you still might have to replace your brick.

It’s the charger side I was talking about here. Androids and iPhones both charge from a USB-A charger. Fast charging has been a crapshoot but I can still charge a phone on about any charger it just might not do a fast charge (which is bad for battery health anyway but that’s another thing )

It was never about connecting between device though? I’m also not sure needing a cable for an Android with micro USB / USB-C and one for lightening is the dramatic issue some have made it out to be. Also I and many have loads of USB A chargers. Do they suddenly become waste? Or do I buy more cables and keep using them? Either way we have waste.

I disagree. You need dynamic pricing but it needs to be manageable. Let’s say you start a cycle on the washing machine then a few minutes in the price suddenly jumps to an extreme high - that’s not manageable.

Giving users some warning throughout the day of price shifts actually meets the point of dynamic pricing better, too. The point is to get more power used when there is excess and less when supply is struggling. That doesn’t happen if people don’t get the chance to plan, even if that planning is only 30 minutes notice.

Ah! I’ll look into that - thank you!

keeping chargers the same will reduce e-waste as people can use USB-C to charge many devices

That’s my point… we already could charge many devices from the chargers we had

The energy company I’m with in the UK offers this type of dynamic pricing. I’m not on that tariff, but the setup is a great idea.

The pitch is that they give you notice , sometimes half hour sometimes more, of price shifts. Then you can chose to maybe do you laundry later or sooner depending what’s going to be better. One of their use cases is even to have a rig where an electric car battery can supply energy to the house. You charge your car when power is cheap / free, run your home from the car’s battery when it gets high.

They even have an API that some people use to automate tasks to take advantage of the price shifts.

Done well it’s excellent, but definitely needs an ethical mindset behind it. Fortunately in the UK, Octopus Energy is nothing if not ethical, but they are very much notable by this difference!

Thing is… the main alternatives are often missing key features. Signal does not let me backup or export my messages & media, that’s a problem for me personally. Telegram and fb messenger are not e2ee by default, and make being so difficult to use. Whatever Google is currently pushing will be demised next month and replaced with something inexplicably more convoluted. Matrix isn’t straightforward enough for mass adoption.

For its many… many… well documented issues WhatsApp provides a very good messaging service that is well polished. For most people that’s what they care about.

We’ll have more success getting people to try new things when they at least have feature parity and ideally offer something new / different to WhatsApp in the UX.

Just replies to another comment to won’t paste again as that’s a bit spammy. But in short USB-A was already a de facto standard for charging. The bit on the end of the phone wasn’t really an issue and I’ve seen little evidence that it was an ewaste issue.

So we’re stuck with USB-C and can’t have whatever will inevitably come along that’s better sooner or later until the EU shift their view.

Basically either has no impact on ewaste or actually generates more waste and discourages further developments in port design.

The USB C thing is daft because we already had a de facto standard. All smartphones connected to a USB-A charger. Requiring USB-C forevermore stifles innovation for whatever in time would supersede USB-C.

There’s also the small matter or ewaste. Mandating that the phone end must be USB-C but saying nothing of the charger end has ended up with most OEMs interpreting it as USB-C both ends. So people are either getting cables that don’t work with their chargers which get wasted or they go buy new chargers causing their old ones to be waste.

As an aside lightening is also a more physically robust design (setting aside transfer speeds etc… which mean nothing to most users), so kinda sucks that all phones will be required to have the tongue-in-port design which is a weak point.

I also wonder when Apple will stick two fingers up at this and go portless and just have wireless, which Androids would then copy, then we’re in a far worse place heh.

Great intentions, execution that delivers little to benefit or, at worst, detriment.

Fair point on the cinema example - didn’t think that one through!

It’s beyond stupid. ISPs are in the business of, ya know… providing internet services. It’s like the government charging the cinema because I used the public roads to get there.

The EU once again showing their ineptitude to actually effectively regulate anything technical. They lack the knowledge or the desire to gain the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.

I also think their USB-C ruling was stupid but not quite as stupid as this.

I’ve always found snapdrop very very inconsistent. When it works is amazing, but it often as not doesn’t see other devices.

LocalSend, on the other hand, is excellent. It’s an app so needs to be installed but it available for about every platform desktop and mobile and is my go-to now.

As a middle ground you could follow a Lemmy community‘s RSS feed then jump in via the link for anything you wanted to see the conversation for :)

I was put off when looking at a Fairphone and checking what spares they sold to find almost all of them sold out… think it was the FP2 or maybe 3 at that point…

FP really needed to have their house in order way sooner. FP4 looks ok, but their “we’ll try our best” update schedule isn’t… great…

I think they’re learning though and expect they’ll get it nailed. Just a shame they didn’t come out with such a solid proposition as Framework in the laptop world!