In early October, the European Parliament voted to require all makers of smartphones to use USB-C charging starting in 2024. Apple’s iPhone, however, uses the Lightning charging method, and this week the company confirmed that it will change to adhere to the new rules.

Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, addressed the issue this week at Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference. 

“Obviously we will have to comply,” Joswiak said at the conference. “We have no choice, like we do around the world, to comply with local laws, but we think the approach would have been better environmentally and better for our customers to not have a government be that prescriptive.” 

Joswiak defended the Lightning connector which Apple has been using since 2012. Apple has begun to use USB-C in some iPads in recent years. 

“It’s been a great connector and over a billion people have it already — [they] have the cables and have what they need, have the infrastructure in their homes, have the speakers, and have an ecosystem that works with it,” Joswiak said, per a CNN transcript. “I don’t mind governments telling us what they want to accomplish,” he said, “but usually we have some pretty smart engineers that help us figure out how to accomplish them technically.”

Ahead of the European Union (EU) ruling, in July a group of progressive U.S. senators wrote a letter arguing for a U.S. universal charging mandate. The senators, Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), wrote to the Commerce Secretary asking to “develop a comprehensive plan that will protect consumers and the environment by addressing the lack of a common charger among mobile devices.”

“We commend the Department of Commerce for the steps it has already taken to address these issues, and we urge you to follow the EU’s lead by developing a comprehensive strategy to address unnecessary consumer costs, mitigate e-waste, and restore sanity and certainty to the process of purchasing new electronics,” they wrote. “The EU has wisely acted in the public interest by taking on powerful technology companies over this consumer and environmental issue.” 

But now that Apple has announced its intention to change the charging, presumably in whatever iPhone lineup is announced next fall, a U.S. mandate is likely now unnecessary. 

Analysts quoted by CNBC said that Apple is likely to switch the iPhone to USB-C charging as soon as the models are released next year and that the change will be applied globally.

Stephen Silver, a technology writer for The National Interest, is a journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to The Philadelphia Inquirer, Philly Voice, Philadelphia Weekly, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Living Life Fearless, Backstage magazine, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.

Image: Reuters.