Apple will officially have to toss away its proprietary Lightning connector on its iPhone range in 2025. The European Parliament has voted in favour of new legislation that would eventually see all mobile phone makers adopt USB-C over other ports. The legislation has been in the works for a while now with lawmakers already investigating it back in 2019.
The EU Parliament has made it clear. Apple will now have to remove the aged Lightning connector from the iPhone range and switch to USB-C if the company still wants to continue selling iPhones in certain countries.
The new legislation wasn’t done in spite. In fact, the EU Parliament simply wants to reduce e-waste and if more devices are using the same connector, this will greatly help with the situation. According to stats, every year 11,000 tonnes of disposed and used chargers are tossed out and put in a landfill. This new legislation aims to reduce that while also saving customers money by allowing them to reuse their chargers and wires.
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The EU’s new rules have yet to be formally put in place but it will happen quite soon. Once done, the phone makers will have two years to abide by these new regulations meaning Apple will have to release a USB-C iPhone in 2024 at the latest.
This legislation doesn’t just cover Apple though. It covers all phone makers and even companies that develop tablets and other portable devices. However, Apple is the only phone manufacturer that still uses a completely different connector. If anything, Apple’s Lightning connector, which was introduced back in 2012, is quite old and limited in speed and connectivity. It is much slower than the top speeds you can get on USB-C, for example.
EU consumers will soon be able to use a single charging solution for their electronic devices after Parliament adopted plans for this today. Press release: https://t.co/GHSQrWvJG1 pic.twitter.com/ncZv0Uinip
— European Parliament (@Europarl_EN) October 4, 2022
Apple usually announces new iPhones around September so given that this law won’t be put into place until October 2024, the company might be able to dodge implementing USB-C until 2025.
If Apple continues to name its iPhones the way it is, this means the iPhone 17 would be the first device to use USB-C. However, we’re not ruling out Apple moving to USB-C sooner. There have been reports that the company was investigating ways to implement the tech a while back. In fact, some reports claim Apple was going to remove the charging port completely from future phones and lean on its MagSafe charging feature instead.
