You probably know the frustration: you are sitting there trying to stuff a charging cable into your phone before realising that no, it’s the wrong one: it is left over from your last phone, or belongs to some other device. Just how many kinds of near-identical cables and sockets is it possible to produce?

It was this frustration, together with the wastage which arises when old chargers are thrown away purely because they won’t fit a charging port, which led the EU to announce in 2022 that phone companies will have to use a common charging cable: the USB type C...