By: Nicolas Huber
Many of us know the feeling of asking someone for a charger, just for them to have the wrong connector. Or having 20 different cables muddled up in a drawer somewhere that just don’t want to separate from each other. Luckily, this may very well be tales of the past in a few years from now as the world is moving towards a universal charger, USB Type-C.
First things first, the earliest version of the USB-C cable was invented by a nonprofit organization called the USB Implementers Forum. It was then published on the 11th of August 2014. It gets its name to distinguish it from other forms of the USB cable like USB-A and USB-B. It looks like a rectangle with rounded corners and a slim line in the middle.
Multiple reasons exist as to why USB-C is objectively better than all other connectors. To start, it’s adaptable in the way that both endings of the cable have the same connector, so it doesn't matter what end you plug into a charging brick or into what you want to charge. Secondly, it charges a lot faster than other connectors. For instance, Apples lightning cable only delivers up to 12 Watts of electricity at time, while USB-C can reach up to 240 Watts! That means filling up your battery that much quicker. Getting the world to switching to USB-C can also reduce electronic waste by not needing different adapters and cables that will eventually get thrown away.
According to bloomberglaw.com, Europe discards 11.000 tons of electronic waste per year, just from discarded chargers.
Europe is at the forefront of making USB-C the primary charging source, by making it mandatory for all new phones, laptops, cameras etc. to be produced to support USB-C charging by 2024. Even tech giants Apple have already changed from their own lightning chargers to USB-C in their latest phone lineup, the iPhone 15s. I think that Europe making that first big step will encourage other countries to start making USB-C mandatory and although not everyone is using one right now, as new technology is equipped with USB-C charging and old tech gets replaced, I'm sure that over the next few years, it will become a unanimous charging cable all around the world.