On Wednesday, Apple revealed that its newest product line, the iPhone 15, will drop the company’s proprietary Lightning port in favor of European-mandated USB-C ports. The company’s newest iPhones feature a charging plug that is slightly bigger and rounder than its predecessor but capable of delivering a faster charge.
Is there any other company in the world that would get front page treatment for switching its charging port to USB-C? The Apple reality distortion field remains alive and well.
This particular moment of reality distortion has been brought to you by the European Union and its USB-C mandate…
Yeah. Apple was the last one and the largest one with another connector.
People weirdly treated Lightning cables differently than say, usb micro for some odd reason.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if one charger fit all iPhones, etc. Oh my, can't have that can we....
All my current chargers will still be able to charge the new iPhones. I will need a couple new cables, though, to make it happen.
I have all the cables I need already.
And the different charger thing is the same with any device as they all optimize to different wattage anyhow. PD isn't as interchangeable as it seems, but it's pretty good.
i'm not saying it's from page of the NYTimes level important, but it does help the more than a billion iphone users around the world (or will as the next gen phones roll out). a universal cell phone charging standard is pretty great, that thanks EU.
Well, there’s the rub - as new phones roll out… And when phones need a “USB-D” as it were will we need to await EU approval?
Eh, no! Nice snark but no. There is no need for yet another plug in the foreseeable time.
This has been a hallmark of Apple's style: Creating items, mostly plugs that "force" people to keep buying Apple products simply to avoid having to deal with connectivity problems. Remember the magnetic plug for MacBook chargers. They now use USB-C plugs for that too (also because of EU?)
Do you have an example of how Apple traps users?
People replace cables far more often than devices. It's part of the design, since cables are cheap and devices are not.
Apple never made a Lightning cable that was incompatible with USB, USB-C, or PD.
The magnetic plug? Which was better than the concurrent barrel connectors? That they used USB-C before anyone else? That they have again, because it's better than USB-C for transferring a large amount of power without breaking cables?
Their laptop chargers worked between model lines over many years, unlike Dell power supplies, which to this day aren't compatible if you switch models. And have been USB-C for like five years now.
The iPad Pro 3, introduced on November 7, 2018, replaced the proprietary Apple Lightning connector with USB-C. Today, all current iPad models use USB-C, as do current Mac Laptops. Rumors that iPhone would finally make the transition have been common for a couple years now. So why is this a surprise?
It's not a surprise but it's still news in an "it's about time" way.
It was a - welcome - surprise to me. The lightning cable seemed unkillable.
In 2021, there were about 282M vehicles in the US.
In 2022, there were about 124M iPhone users in the US.
(I couldn't find a same-year source for both.)
If half the new cars coming out switched fueling receptacle standards, I believe that would also be front-page news.
Except that there aren't 124M new iPhone users in the US every year. They last quite a few years.
There were under 14 million new cars and trucks sold last year in the US. There were 74 million iPhones sold, and about 12 million iPads.
They even neutered the connection on the non "Pro" models.
USB 2.0 in 2023. Because fuck you, that's why.
So it's the same transfer speed as if they kept the existing Lightning.
Are you still syncing your photos and music to your computer with a cable in 2023? If so you're definitely in the minority.
You don't know the difference between latency and throughput, do you?
USB 2.0 has a max data transfer speed of 480 Mbps. The Lightning cable has a max data transfer speed of 480 Mbps.
What were we talking about again, brainiac?
Translation: "I have no idea what those terms mean and aren't they the same thing anyway?" But you do you.
I was actually referring to the cables' bandwidth.
Lol, you sound like a freshman Computer Science student who just learned some new words. By all means, it sounds like you're dying to tell us why the latency and throughput of these cables is hugely relevant to this conversation.
You know, you could have just told us what those terms mean and what the differences are, followed by asking why is that relevant to your comment (Of course, if you had done that, it would have been obvious why your comment in re synching was so clueless.)
You didn't, preferring instead to dissemble, making you that loser tosser fellow (see my comments above as to why). And I feel no remorse for curb-stomping you on this one given that _you_ butt-headedly insisted on making this into a contest. In future, try not to be so butthead oppositional in your interactions with others.
You've certainly made two things clear:
1) The point you're consistently refusing to actually make is STILL irrelevant to this conversation.
2) You clearly need to up your meds.
What is wrong with you today?
Either spit it out and say what you meant or log the heck off.
It’s the biggest phone in the US.
A better question perhaps is: what does it say about NYT readers that this matters so much to them?
I’m not sure we can conclude the issue matters “so much” to the readers of that newspaper. The editors don’t always get it right.
Apple is the most valuable firm in history, still, by a significant margin. Its market cap is roughly equal to the GDP of Italy. Of course it generates headlines when it announces a major change.
The Lightning charger is a much nicer design than USB-C. Making it proprietary was clearly a mistake, as it prevented it from becoming standard and led us to be stuck with an inferior standard design.
IS it actually inferior, though? Because lightning cables deliver either 9W or 18W of power. By contrast, USB-C can support up to 100W of power. That's 5 to 10 times more power.
The lightning cable is also "notoriously flimsy" (Wirecutter's words, not mine, but I concur). USB-C cables and ports are more powerful and more robust. The lightning cable is a bad design in comparison - comparable to micro-USB in its flimsiness.
That's more because no additional development was spent on the Lighting, not the form factor. They could have upped that, but didn't. The Lighting connector is more robust, less likely to fail, and more waterproof.
Apple is party to the USB development.
It wasn't a mistake. It was Apple SOP. They got in serious trouble years ago when they did the same with their operating system, remember?
No, when was that?
It's kind of nice when a market-dominant company is forced to adhere to a universal standard.
Imagine a world where everyone used the same standard to make interoperability possible...like an social API (like the W3C's ActivityPub) or an internet language model (like the W3C's HTML specification), etc.
Well, since around 85 percent of smartphones in use worldwide are Android phones, not I-phones, makes sense to me.
It's news because the elite fork out for the cost of I-phones - the rest of us make do fine with a 1to 2 hundred dollar Android.
There are 124M elites in the US?! That's news to me!
No, in actuality what you're missing is that you can buy older models of iPhones for a few hundred bucks. It can be worth it.
Don’t look at me. I have enough trouble finding cables for 5th generation iPod. (I did find them.)
There was a brilliant South Park episode where Cartman could not wait for the latest Nintendo Wii to be in the stores, so he froze himself, planning to be thawed on the day the game console was available. There is a big snowstorm, no one can find him, and he gets thawed out many years in the future. He then goes through a lot of trouble to find that Wii, finally locating one in an old technology museum in the middle of a jungle. He gets the console to his future home and needs it hooked to a screen. The joke is - no existing cable will work.
Ugh, that day is today, the Wii didn't support 4k (the Wii-U did tho)