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I don't understand why Apple are dragging their heels on this so much
by Lapalux 3y ago
I don't understand why Apple are dragging their heels on this so much
- withinboredom 3y agoMoney.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoApple can easily afford this. The real reasons for their foot-dragging are their need to differentiate their products, and their need (driven by their organisational culture) to feel that they are in control.
- pipodeclown 3y agoWhat he means is, having a proprietary connector means they can milk accessory makers with licensing fees.
- Gigachad 3y agoWhat accessory makers? The only thing lightning is used for these days is charging. I can’t imagine that charging cables is a huge money spinner for apple.
- withinboredom 3y agoHere's a few accessories I can think of: - headphones - displays - "gas station" chargers (for when you leave yours at home and just need something cheap) - memory card readers These are just the ones I own.
- Gigachad 3y agoOther than charging cables, none of those are the average person uses on an iphone. The ipads now all use usb c. I cant imagine Apple would be risking huge fines for the EU for the 10 people who plug SD cards in to their phone.
- sschueller 3y agoI assume the large car makers are paying apple a huge amount to be able to install lightning cable adapters in the cars.
- sircastor 3y agoThey’re not. In fact I’ve never seen a lightning port on a non-Apple device. The other end of the cable is either USB-A or USB-C. And Apple is pushing for new vehicles to use CarPlay wirelessly anyway.
- oxfordmale 3y agoIt is not the charging cables, but the actual chargers itself. They are eye watering expensive if you buy them from Apple directly. Amazon and eBay are flooded with fakes that can be life threateningly dangerous. I can see why some people prefer to buy from Apple rather than figuring out what brands are actually not going to burn your house down.
- Gigachad 3y agoI just had a look. The charging bricks they use are USB-C (the phones come with a lightning to C cable now) and cost $30 AUD. That seems very cheap.
- oxfordmale 3y agoVersus $0 for all the chargers I have collected over the years.
- Gigachad 3y agoUse those then? They all work on the iPhone
- Dylan16807 3y agoGoodbye goalposts.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoGood point re dangerous fakes, but I wonder how persuasive it is in practice. Ive occasionally seen teardowns of fire-risk power blocks on hn, but (genuine question, because idk) is that a mainstream concern?
- oxfordmale 3y agoI bought a 100W Apple MacBook charger from Amazon. After using it for a few hours, it has a burnt smell. I can't be the only one that experienced this.
- andyjohnson0 3y agoI get that. But I've always struggled to believe that revenue from licencing or direct sales of Lightning connectors is that big a deal to Apple. I think their insistence on using their own connector is more about product differentiation and lock-in than about revenue and performance.
- drexlspivey 3y agoWhy do the new ipads have USB-C then?
- bonzini 3y agoBecause they want you to be able to use external USB docking stations. Lightning doesn't interoperate with external displays.
- relix 3y agoI don't think this is the main reason. How many millions in licensing fee profit are they really earning? It seems like a drop in the bucket comparative to their total profit. And if that's the reason, why does the iPad have USB-C?
- sbuk 3y agoLazy reasoning. Previous bad press when changing 30-pin to lightning.
- eastbound 3y agoThe bad press was because it was a proprietary-connector-against-a-newer-proprietary-connector. Had Apple changed for USB-C at the time, or USB mini, it would have made the same positive press as when the Macbook Pro got back to normal (ie not “Here’s a single port for everything, go buy an Apple dongle if you want to plug a screen”).
- InTheArena 3y agoNo, it really wasn’t. It was people and places that had invested in 30 pin sudden;ly having those be useless. USB was _awful_ at that point.
- sbuk 3y agoThe USB-C spec wasn't finalised until the following year and only fully standardised in 2016. The USC-C port, which Apple contributed to considerably first appeared in 2015. Micro USB, which superseded Mini USB, was and remains to be complete and utter shite. Lightning was actually well received by the tech press of the time for being significantly better than Micro USB. The "bad press" was users on this site, among others, whining about their other 30-pin gadgets.
- dist-epoch 3y agoApple supposedly has the superior technology of the elite people, as opposed to the unwashed masses who use Android. So it's embarrassing for them to adopt pleb technology.
- sharedbeans 3y agoYes, this is why for years now their highest end iPads have all used... USB-C?
- misnome 3y agoOn what? This article is pure speculation, and Apple has been slowly moving more and more of their ecosystem to USB-C over time anyway. It sounds like good for the consumer that they don't have to throw out all of their existing cables at once. .... and as far as I can tell USB-C is a shitshow of an ecosystem anyway. This entire article could just be saying that Apple devices could charge "slower" on random USB-C cables and only guarantee fast charging on Apple-branded cables.... ... which sounds like Apple being anticompetitive if you know nothing about the state of the USB-C ecosystem.
- tinus_hn 3y agoIf Apple just sticks to the specification to the letter they achieve exactly what they want and what HackerNews hates, only proper power supplies work and cheap inferior crap charges slowly. They can just put a logo on cables and chargers that work to the specification instead of cutting corners left and right in the race to the bottom. And there is no way for the EU to appear credible and restrict this.
- ohgodplsno 3y agohttps://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/04/eu-warns-apple-about-limiting-usb-c-iphone-cables/ https://www.macrumors.com/2023/05/04/eu-warns-apple-about-li... Europe actually has some teeth. Playing dumb when Europe tells you "try me" is a sure way to be banned out of the common market. >And there is no way for the EU to appear credible and restrict this. And yet here we are.
- tinus_hn 3y ago> Europe actually has some teeth. Playing dumb when Europe tells you "try me" is a sure way to be banned out of the common market. It all remains to be seen, some EU Joe random hotshot issuing warnings is no more than that, warnings. If any action is to come from the EU side, it’ll be after years and years of legal wrangling and it wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Apples lawyers end up outsmarting some pompous EU councilman.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y agoAt least this thing should be clear. Apple's motto has always been "Think different". They were selling personal computers but wanted them to be different from PCs. In order to do that, they would introduce many changes that were presented as superior. And in fact, many (if not most) were actually excellent. Some, such as removal of ports, gluing parts together and making devices hard to repair, were plain user-hostile. In this case, it's mostly about the money though.
- sbuk 3y agoRemoving ports is ironic as, other than headphone jacks from phones, USB type A being dropped from MacBooks (iMacs and Minis have always had USB Type A) in favour of USB-C is the port HN loves to moan about, and here we are, arguing for USB-C on an Apple device. The money, as others point out is a rounding error.
- Jochim 3y ago> USB type A being dropped from MacBooks (iMacs and Minis have always had USB Type A) in favour of USB-C is the port HN loves to moan about. The switch to USB C wasn't the primary issue. The main complaint was that the laptop only had two ports: a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a single USB C for everything else. The previous iteration had 6. People were angry that they were being forced to buy a hub if they fell into the ultra niche use case of wanting to charge while using any kind of peripheral at all. Thinking about it, most USB hubs came with USB-A ports. I wonder if we'd have seen USB-A die off more rapidly if Apple had included a sensible number of ports on the Macbook.
- robertoandred 3y agoThere was no previous iteration of that laptop.
- Jochim 3y agoIs there some point you're trying to make or are you just being needlessly pedantic? The 2016 Macbook Air[0] was not the first in the series. The lack of ports was controversial due to it differing from the previous 2015 model[1]. [0] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP741?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP741?locale=en_US [1] https://support.apple.com/kb/SP714?locale=en_US https://support.apple.com/kb/SP714?locale=en_US
- a13o 3y agoThe last time they changed their connector (to lightning) they invalidated a lot of third party accessories designed around the old connector. Not simple stuff, like cables, but docks galore; many in expensive long-term purchases like luxury cars and stereo equipment. It stressed a lot of partnerships that define Apple's luxury brand status.
- prettyStandard 3y agoI agree that switching creates waste, not switching creates other waste. If they wanted to minimize waste, they should have released lighting and usb-c iphones years ago and slowly phased out the lighting. Maybe even just update lightning to support USBC speeds. But alas we are stuck with this local optimum when there was a better global optimum that we missed for profit.
- askvictor 3y agoIf they wanted to minimize waste they would have contributed to developing USB-C, which would have been in the pipeline when they were working on Lightning. Or failing that, making Lightning an open standard that other gadget makers could adopt. But that doesn't make as much money as vendor lock-in.
- dagmx 3y agoThey were one of the contributors to USB-C based on the learnings from lightning though, and one of the earliest adopters of it with their Macs. I get people want to do the whole “<XYZ Company> is evil” but at least get the basics of the argument right.
- Gigachad 3y agoI remember there used to be a huge number of these speakers where you would sit the phone or ipod on the connector/stand. And all of those got obsoleted by the switch to lightning, but I don't think I've seen a single design like that since the 30 pin connector was dropped. It's all bluetooth now. And with the more even split between iphones and android these days, no hardware maker would put a fixed lightning stand on a device now.