or every one time they successfully push a company to do something correct -- but ultimately trivial, like this thing -- there are going to be 10 cases where some bureaucrat makes a bad decision
This is a truism, but does it have any basis in reality? Certainly, if every manufacturer were forced to use USB-C for everything it could lead to an innovation problem, but I don't think makers of new products are forbidden from offering innovative kinds of connectivity, which the market might or might not decide to adopt. Nor is the issue trivial just because it's physically small, any more than the design of electrical wall sockets is of low importance.
They're making Apple do it because they have huge market share, a long history of foisting different physical connectors on their customers and generating a significant amount of electronic waste as older models are abandoned. Crucially, the charging devices end up being unwanted because they don't work with anything else including other iphones. Sure, they could enjoy a longer life with the use of adapters, but physical adapters are Not Great.
It's a pity, because Apple does innovate and some of their innovations are very cool, eg the magnetized charging ports on Macbooks was an Apple first iirc. But they also have a reputation for stiffing their own customers by ignoring backward compatibility , assuming that most of their customers will grumble but keep paying for the new model because they like the ecosystem.
Have you ever, like, actually interacted with a bureaucracy? I don't mean a governmental one, necessarily. An even mid-sized company's HR department, let's say. I was just trying to get a medical evaluation for my son: I called them and they spent 10 minutes on the phone with me explaining that they were going to send me four emails before they had a 30 minute call with me before they were going to do the actual evaluation of my son. They told me that I could fill out the two surveys in the four emails that they sent me via, and I quote exactly, "A desktop or a laptop or an iPad, but not an iPhone: this is for security reasons."
It's hilarious that your big question is: "Does the idea that bureaucracies routinely make money-and-time-wasting decisions have any basis in reality." You should investigate this reality at some point.
Of course. Some of them are awful and some of them are fine. You might as well reason that 'Apple is a corporation; corporations are essentially large bureaucracies; therefore anything produced by Apple will embody all the flaws of bureaucracy.' And indeed many people make arguments like this here on HN daily, arguing that large companies can't innovate because they're simply not agile enough.
It's not that bureaucracies can't be terrible, they absolutely can. But it's overly simplistic to argue that they're constitutionally terrible by virtue of merely existing.
Apple is a bureaucracy and I'm sure they make lots of bad decisions. But they're a much smaller bureaucracy then the EU, operating on a much smaller range of decisions.
What I actually said was that a very large bureaucracy operating over a gigantic domain and trying to make rules at very fine levels of detail across that domain would make bad decisions. Like, say, "we're regulating the entire economic system of half a billion people in very diverse economic circumstances down to the level of exactly what heads should be in what phone chargers."
This is a truism, but does it have any basis in reality? Certainly, if every manufacturer were forced to use USB-C for everything it could lead to an innovation problem, but I don't think makers of new products are forbidden from offering innovative kinds of connectivity, which the market might or might not decide to adopt. Nor is the issue trivial just because it's physically small, any more than the design of electrical wall sockets is of low importance.
They're making Apple do it because they have huge market share, a long history of foisting different physical connectors on their customers and generating a significant amount of electronic waste as older models are abandoned. Crucially, the charging devices end up being unwanted because they don't work with anything else including other iphones. Sure, they could enjoy a longer life with the use of adapters, but physical adapters are Not Great.
It's a pity, because Apple does innovate and some of their innovations are very cool, eg the magnetized charging ports on Macbooks was an Apple first iirc. But they also have a reputation for stiffing their own customers by ignoring backward compatibility , assuming that most of their customers will grumble but keep paying for the new model because they like the ecosystem.