Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
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Why does nobody ever read / listen? The EU charger is the charger end of the cable, that has no effect on the Lightning end that goes into the phone. @Leo started off correctly, saying it was the charger, then it sank into a debate about the lightning port…
Having both ends USB-C would be the ideal, but that isn’t what is being mandated.
USB-A chargers (iPhone, most Android phones and most other non-phone, small device chargers) are based around a very old specification that provides next to no power. Because of that, manufacturers have been breaking the standard left-right-and-centre to get several amps up the cable to “quick charge” their phones or provide more than the 0.5A that are allowed by the standard.
That means that, even if you have a quick charging phone and a quick charging charger, if they aren’t both from the same manufacturer, they will probably drop back to some lower charging rate that both can use.
USB-C is designed to provide several amps and can charge everything from headphones to fairly high end laptops - those with heavy duty graphic chips being an exception. This would provide for more conformity. Yes, you still need to ensure you have a charger than can provide 5A, 15W or whatever, but if it provides that, it will charge/power your device with that, it won’t be a “proprietary 15W” that your device won’t accept (i.e. your device doesn’t have to send out the right manufacturer’s signal to get the 15W, it sends out the standard USB-C negotiated 15W).
It is obvious that this will need to change over time, as technology moves forward, but the law can be amended at some point, when something better comes along. But at the moment it is the best solution.
For example there is a problem with some Raspberry Pis being “underclocked”, because the owners slap any old USB-A charger with a USB-A to Micro-USB cable and it doesn’t provide enough power to run at normal speeds, so the device under clocks.
Edit: Given that Apple have dropped “legacy” ports on their Macs and only having USB-C, where does that leave the iPhone with USB-A to Lightning cable? Are they saying that the iPhone is a legacy device? 
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I thought the vote was an agreement to draft a law? I don’t think anything’s been decided yet, apart from the agreement of a common charger standard. What form that takes hasn’t been decided yet. MacRumors has an interesting article about the history and the options open to the EC now:
The significant bit is:
almost a fifth of people surveyed reported having faced “significant issues” because of non-standard chargers. Such issues included incompatible chargers between devices, variable charging speeds between different chargers, and having to have several chargers available to cover all needs.
Given the options, such as USB-C to lightning converter on the cable, I don’t see what Apple’s problem is, other than Apple users would be free to use any USB-C charger and just plug their USB-C to Lightning cable into it…
One thing they should standardise on I reckon is USB Power Delivery to standardise the way phones day charge. We currently have conflicting methods such as QuickCharge, whatever protocol One Plus uses etc. I think that will be the main effect of standardising the charger.
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Exactly. That is the biggest pain at the moment. I have a high capacity charger from my old phone, but it can only slow charge my new phone, because it uses a different standard and falls back to the lowest common denominator.
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Thanks a lot for getting that stupid song stuck in my head again 
Trump ads will take over YouTube on Election Day
What is the maximum budget that a campaign can legally give out in the USA? Over here, it is tightly controlled, there is a legal maximum that can be spent. I think it is in the low 2-digit millions for national elections, which is a lot more than it used to be. For regional elections, the budget is usually in the low to mid 5 digit thousands (20K - 40K).
Certainly “taking over” the front page of something like YouTube would be illegal, I believe.
The perfectly on-point rant of Owen about Amazon’s impact and Jeff Bezos’ 10-billion-foundation (#yayIndividualTaxBreak) at 1:06:12 and the response merely being a background laughter, a joke, and a topic change was what really made me scratch my head. Of course, sometimes you want to move on in the programme and it’s also perfectly fine not to always have the most measured response, but this one felt like tuning into bizzaro world.
In my eyes, it goes hand in hand with the prevailing idea of “you cannot punish companies for becoming too successful”, which is a grotesque re-interpretation of reality that “as you become the biggest company most checks, balances, contributions, and expectations gradually dwindle to nothing since you are becoming to big to fail”.
Other than that an interesting show - thank you, guys! Even (maybe exactly) when I co-rant a bit, I am grateful for you to stir up topics that are relevant to me. It’s all about variety and exchange of perspectives.
Sidenote: It would be useful to have something akin to the Soundcloud functionality where you can link to a specific place in the audio stream for others to know what a poster is going on about.
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So much this…
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I don’t think there is a limit. Ad spend for the 2020 elections will surpass $6 billion dollars.
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I’d also like to see a requirement for more obvious labeling; I swear Apple lists the amperage with a font that is roughly 1mm tall. And good luck figuring out the supported capabilities for any Type C charger/cable/port when it comes to a computer.
A USB-C standard will not stifle innovation. It is just a form factor. The wire can transmit plenty of electricity as well as data. The only thing it possibly will stifle is making a mag safe connector or something smaller than the current USB-C.
Thank you Owen for explaining how much carbon Amazon contributes to the atmosphere. In addition to all the extra driving vs me going to the store and buying a dozen items at once, there is so so much waste in all the cardboard boxes they use. When things ship to stores, they are on pallets wrapped in plastic usually. Think of it as one box per pallet. With Amazon, it is one box per toothbrush as your example would have it.
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