The IEC 62368-1 safety standards represent an important transition from the IEC 60065 and 60950-1 standards that currently govern companies marketing audio-visual products or computing/communications equipment in North America and the EU. As a unified replacement for the previous two standards, IEC 62368-1 is more significant than a simple merger or name change as it adopts fundamentally different engineering principles and terminologies. IEC 62368-1 ultimately aims to give designers more flexibility in product design and evaluation by implementing Hazard Based Safety Engineering (HBSE) principles that replace the traditional prescriptive approach. These HBSE principles seek to identify potential hazards as energy sources capable of causing pain or injury to others, while finding ways to prevent such energy transfer. The 2nd edition of IEC 62368-1 is the latest revision that has been accepted by the US, Canada, and EU. This standard currently coexists with 60950-1 and 60065 to aid designers in the transition and includes several clauses to help companies manage legacy inventory of subsystems and components. However, the official adoption of 62368-1 remains on an uncertain timeline as the EU recently pushed its go live date from June 2019 to December 2020. As a result, UL in North America has also pushed back its adoption timeline to December 2020 to harmonize with the EU.