It’s official: Apple is fully at liberty to make a portless iPhone if it wants to. There is nothing in EU regulations to say iPhones must feature a USB-C charging port, and a spokesman for the body has confirmed this in writing.
Journalists are taught that if someone says it’s raining, and someone else say it isn’t, your job isn’t to quote both sides. It’s to look out of the window. On Wednesday, Ben Lovejoy at 9to5Mac looked out of the window by contacting European Commission press officer Federica Miccoli to ask if a portless smartphone would be allowable under EU regulations.
“Yes,” Miccoli replied. “Since, such radio equipment cannot be recharged via wired charging, it does not need to incorporate the harmonised (wired) charging solution.”
That goes against a theory buzzing around the Apple punditsphere earlier in the week. We covered a report Monday which claimed the rumored iPhone 17 Air had at one stage been envisioned as a portless device, but that Apple had pulled back from this plan in large part because it feared such a development would anger EU regulators. The EU requires that all smartphones sold in its jurisdiction have USB-C charging ports, which is why the iPhone 14 and 3rd-gen iPhone SE had to be dropped from sale there slightly earlier than planned.
But it turns out they only have to have USB-C charging ports if they offer wired charging. A Lightning charging port is not allowed. A 30-pin charging port, aside from being insane, would not be allowed. But no charging port at all is legally fine.
The EU does encourage standardised wireless charging standards, and if Apple pursued its own tech on this front it could run into trouble. But as 9to5Mac notes, the company effectively ‘gave’ MagSafe to the world, and MagSafe iPhones are compatible with Qi2 chargers made by other companies. It wouldn’t have any difficulties in this respect.
Whether a portless iPhone would be successful remains to be seen, of course. I think it would be a sensible development which would make future iPhone models better while catalysing improvements in wireless tech more generally, and said so in an opinion piece… which has proved rather controversial. Customers may not be ready to give up their ports quite yet. But when they are, we now know that the law won’t present any obstacles either.