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The Lightning connector being proprietary does suck, but it's far and away the best mobile device connector I've used. It's small, easy to connect, and disconne
by mynameisvlad 11y ago
The Lightning connector being proprietary does suck, but it's far and away the best mobile device connector I've used. It's small, easy to connect, and disconnects fairly easily on tug. USB-C is pretty nice, but for similar feature set you have a much larger connector.
- makomk 11y agoLightning and USB-C aren't really comparable because USB-C supports USB 3.1 while Lightning is limited to USB 2 speeds for everything, including video out. Which means that Apple have to compress the video out and stick an entire ARM SoC in their very expensive AV adapter to decompress it, and this degrades the picture quality. By comparison, USB-C can carry uncompressed HD video, power, and a fast USB 3 data link at the same time using (at least in theory) cheap, mostly-passive adapters.
- mynameisvlad 11y agoThe latest iPad Pro IIRC has some sort of post-2 chip (I just don't remember if it's 3 or 3.1), it's just not being used yet. The connector itself has 16 total pins available, and the plug has 8. Since the Type C connector is 18 pins with 2 being orientation detection and 4 being ground, it's still possible to have the Lightning connector itself support 3.1 by actually using both sides at the same time instead of just one at a time; although those extra 2 pins would be handy. So in terms of the connector itself, they're still pretty comparable, it's just that Apple for whatever reason didn't want to add support for it. Edit: Cleared up some things that were actually untrue after researching it a bit more.
- djrogers 11y agoThe iPad pro is actually able to use the USB 3 chip with the new SD card adapter Apple just released.