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Farhad Manjoo
Opinion Columnist
If you bought a new phone, computer, game console or some other such device in the past few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve been charging it using a cable with at least one end that looks something like a squashed Tic Tac — a rectangular plug with rounded corners, about a tenth of an inch long and a third of an inch wide.
Officially, per the coalition of tech companies that determines this sort of thing, a connector of this shape is known as Universal Serial Bus Type-C. But its friends just call it USB-C — and I suspect that sooner or later we will all grow enormously friendly with this capable little cable.
USB-C’s singular selling point is universality. It was designed to plug in to more or less everything to accomplish more or less anything, thereby cutting down on the number and variety of cables one needs to navigate digital life. This may strike you as a small blessing, but these aren’t times to scoff at small blessings. Insofar as it is possible to find not just utility but something like joy in the mitigation of trivial but nevertheless regularly agonizing inconveniences of modern life, USB-C might be one of the more life-changing innovations of our age.
Techies reading this will argue I’m blowing smoke. USB-C is not even new; the first devices bearing these ports went on sale in 2015.
True, but realizing USB-C’s full potential has taken some time. The technology has had to overcome numerous technical challenges, and it has had to achieve a certain critical mass across the device ecosystem. Only this week, finally, did USB-C’s one-cable dream start to become inevitable. On Monday, in an effort to reduce electronic waste, the European Union’s member states approved a rule requiring USB-C charging ports on “all new mobile phones, tablets, digital cameras, headphones and headsets, hand-held video game consoles and portable speakers, e-readers, keyboards, mice, portable navigation systems, earbuds and laptops” sold in the E.U.
The rule will phase in over a few years, but it has already achieved results with the main holdout, Apple, which had gone all-in on USB-C for its computers and tablets but stuck to its proprietary connector, called Lightning, for the iPhone. An Apple executive told an interviewer at The Wall Street Journal’s tech conference on Tuesday that even though Apple opposed the law, it would “have to comply.” It’s not clear if this means that all iPhones or just European ones will get a USB-C port. Here’s hoping it’s the former.
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