Somewhere in your home, I'd bet there is a drawer holding all manner of charger wires for Kindles, point-and-shoot cameras, digital watches, smartphones — what have you.
When something needs charging, you fumble through the drawer until the charger with the right fitting on it is found.
All that is about to change. As it turns out, the driving force behind it turned out to be a 35-year-old lawyer who was elected to represent Malta — an island country located in the central Mediterranean Sea — in the European Union.
Malta is tiny. The 10th smallest country in the world by land size. In square miles, it measures only 122 of them. Polk County, by comparison, measures just over 2,000 square-miles. More square-miles in Polk County are covered by water than the entire land area of Malta.
And yet, this tiny nation played a major part in standardizing how electrical devices are charged. Including Apple's iPhone, which uses its proprietary Lightning charger. And that proprietary charger will now be phased out.
There was a time when there were more than 30 different types of USB charging cables. Agius Saliba, our 35-year-old lawyer, had a drawer containing a good many of those styles. Last year, he held a handful of them in one hand as he stood before the European Parliament, and held up a single USB-C charger in the other hand.
"Today, we are replacing this pile of chargers with just ... this," holding up the lone USB-C.
Ben Cohen of The Wall Street Journal laid all this out in an article about a month ago. He reported that EU officials expect the regulations will "save tons of electronic wastes and $250 million a year." Apple responded by saying it would stifle innovation and inconvenience more than a billion people who relied on cables that would become obsolete.
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What Apple didn't mention were the customers that were inconvenienced when Apple introduced the Lightning connector in 2012.
The standardization has been a long time coming. The Journal article pointed out that the EU was trying to get a standardized charger even before Lightning came out in 2012 and USB-C was introduced two years later.
Europe represents about a quarter of Apple's revenue, and even though it's a minor amount, Apple doesn't want to make one model for Europe and another for the United States. So when the iPhone 15 was announced this year, it became the first iPhone with a USB-C charging port.
Saliba worked to get the legislation moving again and headed the negotiations. He told the WSJ that EU members meant for the law to be flexible, and that government must adapt to changing times.