The wait for a USB-C compatible iPhone is finally over. Or, at least, it will be in Europe in two years’ time.
The European Parliament formally approved a standard that would need all small and mid-sized electronics to charge via the same standard of USB-C. This proposal was agreed upon back in June, but Parliament took a summer recess before making it official. EU member states have 24 months after ratification to start enforcing the new law, meaning Apple can’t keep producing Lightning-based iPhones in those countries past 2024.
Brazil’s government also recently stopped the sale of iPhones that don’t come with a charging brick, stating that adopting USB-C would be one way to lift the suspension.
As such, we may not even have to wait until 2024. A pair of major Apple prognosticators in Ming-Chi Kuo and Mark Gurman both said back in May that Apple was likely to bring a USB-C iPhone to market in 2023, with Gurman reporting that Apple had been testing the idea internally at the time.
In other words, the iPhone 15 may finally, at long last, ditch the Lightning cable in favor of something that works with every other device you own. Hooray.
Apple was really the final big USB-C holdout, at least for flagship smartphones. Handsets from other companies like Google and Samsung have been using USB-C for years. A