Indeed, government regulation is decried mostly because of all the cases where it got polluted by special interests, instead of following the interests of general consumers.

This is how you end up turning a chunk of your food supply into fuel to subsidize crops which aren't all that good at being distilled into fuel in the first place...

> It’s time to accept regulation actually does work when you have a competent government.

Given that it's the EU making those regulations, it looks like the government only has to be semi-competent. Maybe the only requirement is that they're not totally in bed with the big corps making money.

Yes! We tried leaving tech unregulated and it did not work. We got huge monopolies screwing consumers at every turn. Time to try something new.

And making them more repairable as someone else said has tradeoffs. It’s not like Apple is the low cost leader. Choose another vendor

Also, they're ignoring the true cost of unrepairable hardware which is e-waste. Perhaps if they're looking for a lighter hand, they'd suggest that less repairable hardware has to have a tax that pays for its PROPER recycling.

> regulation actually does work when you have a competent government

This is the free market. Free as in, regulated to allow and encourage market entry and competition (as with replacement keyboards), not free as in unregulated. When you look back at when 'free market' was first strongly mentioned as a term, this is what it meant.

We can't rely on the government to step on any time consumers are getting abused. We need to teach consumers to do better.

> usb-c

Don't forget about the time micro-USB has mandated. Was that "competent government"?

Both you and GP are correct!

We've also seen this within the US - California generally makes the first move and then companies just follow that law because they know others might change and it's easier than doing it by state. One relatively small law can have a big impact, we also follow GDPR in the US because a lot of companies operate in europe too

People need to stop buying apple products. Anyone dumb enough to have already done so deserves what they get.

Nope. What the real effect has been is a waste of billions of billions that have gone into changing stuff that never needed changing. Future development has now been slowed down as well in the EU.

All it takes to see that government regulation never works, is to look at how far behind the EU is in terms of GDP growth compared with the US and China who both have a significantly lighter touch when it comes to regulation.

The EU is f*cked, and will become a little socialist region, with manual and tourist industry jobs, where rich people from the rest of the world go for a few weeks of vacation.

I left the EU a long time ago, and I've earned so much money after leaving the socialist madness, that I recommend all young people I meet to do the same.

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C.

If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

Gigachad writing there <3

Chat control is not something that indicates competence. They're throwing darts and sometimes hit the board.

Having the government regulate the free market is an issue of physical force and should always be discussed as such. Are you willing to deal with men by force beyond retaliation? This issue is moral, not practical.

Besides, it’s easy to sell one’s freedom to a competent government, but it’s insanely hard to get it back when it rots. This has been the case of many welfare states. “Let’s force them to do the damn thing” is the very root of all social conflicts, not a magical solution. Being able to withstand it is a commendable exception, not rule.