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I think Apple genuinely believe that they can provide a better product, and I believe they can too. I just don't care. The inability to borrow cables or swap t

I think Apple genuinely believe that they can provide a better product, and I believe they can too. I just don't care. The inability to borrow cables or swap them between devices in the past was a not insignificant hassle. Keeping boxes of cables, not being able to borrow a friend's charger when visiting, not being able to replace cables except by ordering a new one from the manufacturer half a world away. Constant minor irritation. The EU's first round of cable standardisation remains one of my favourite quality-of-life laws. No slightly more reliable cable is worth more than me than knowing I can use the same cable on as many devices as possible, and that I'm never going to be stuck in the middle of nowhere unable to buy a replacement charger for my phone. It's also a point which the invisible hand has a great deal of trouble solving, because phones are such a vital part of life that you're unlikely to refuse to buy simply on the basis of its charger. It's an easy bit of revenue for manufacturers to jump on, because they know it's probably not quite annoying enough to significantly affect device choice. I love me a free market solution, but it's important to recognise where the market fails, and we've already seen it fail to solve this problem once.

lallysingh 7y ago
Agreed. Also let's remember that Apple makes a pretty penny off of all those cables and chargers.
- Lio 7y ago
  More worrying to me, the charging port on this iPhone is wearing out. Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone. Lightning is a crap proprietary design from my point of view. If it was USB-C I could just change the cable.
  - dimman 7y ago
    Your statement would make more sense if USB-C somehow magically would be immune to wear, but it’s not.
    - eurleif 7y ago
      You didn't understand this sentence: "Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone." With Lightning, the springs are in the phone. With USB-C, the springs are in the cable. Springs are a moving part, and thus especially vulnerable to wear. Replacing a cable is cheaper than replacing a phone.
      - dimman 7y ago
        I did. The springs wearing out very much means bad contact at the contact points, we do agree there. However the receiver end with gold plated contacts points do also wear out. I’ve yet to see anything pointing towards springs wearing out before the gold plated areas (that is being worn by friction each insertion/removal) do. I’ve got a Lightning cable with worn out gold plated contact points, the springs in the phone are perfectly fine. My point being that without some reliable statistics pointing to springs being way more susceptible to wear than gold plated contact points, it doesn’t make any difference. (FWIW: I currently work with factory equipment for PCB production testing and bad contact due to oxidation and wear is a much bigger issue than springs going bad, but that’s just my experience.)
- georgespencer 7y ago
  Folks keep asserting this. Do you have any evidence to support this view?
  - michaelt 7y ago
    It's quite well documented that manufacturers have to pay Apple to use lightning connectors, under the MFi scheme. While Apple doesn't issue a price sheet publicly it's been widely reported [1] as $4 per lightning connector - and that in the past it's been as much as $10 per device. $4 per cable in licensing fees for every single cable sold sounds pretty nice to me. I can understand Apple wanting to keep that. [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/02/07/apple-lowers-mfi-lightening-licensing-fees-paving-way-for-more-affordable-ios-accessories- https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/02/07/apple-lowers-mfi-...
    - AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
      > $4 per cable That seems high considering that Anker (chosen as a cheap but good company presumably not dodging Apple's licensing scheme) is selling lightning cables on Amazon for 8 bucks [1] Amazon Basics has them for 6.50 [2] I don't think they are sending 50% and 75% of their gross to Apple. 1> https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Powerline-Lightning-Probably-Certified/dp/B06XFK2H8Z https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Powerline-Lightning-Probably-Ce... 2> https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Certified/dp/B07DC4RYCG https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert...
      - lallysingh 7y ago
        Why not? The cables are probably purchased from a few bulk vendors and sold after the license fees are paid. That's still 10+% margin on a low risk product. Apple charges 30% for the app store, and that's very little overhead for then.
        georgespencer 7y ago
        > and that's very little overhead for then. Do you actually know this or are you making an assumption? The App store seems to me like it would have some significant overheads both in cost and executional complexity. This[1] article posits that Apple made $4.2bn p.a. from app store revenue share in the period 2008 - 2018. Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L): 1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front. 2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases. 3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management). 4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review. 5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps. 6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.) In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates. Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss. I think what you might mean to say is that the app store is still a wildly profitable endeavour for Apple. I actually don't know if that's true or not. I know that Apple doesn't usually do things for free or at break even, but equally they run a combined P&L because breaking out the profitability of every single revenue line is very difficult. In this instance, you could say: iPhone is a very profitable product, and app store is part of that. But dismissing the overheads or complexity of delivering a consumer app store on this scale seems clumsy, at best. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itunes-app-store-music-services-businesses https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-process-for-the-app-store-works.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces... [3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind-10-years-ios-app-store/ https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind... [4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/ https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/
- sneak 7y ago
  https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-you/ https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-y...
fiter 7y ago
Maybe it doesn't matter to most people anymore, but these ports are for more than charging. This regulation could stifle using this port for other features. That said, it's pretty obvious where everything is going (wireless), so it's not clear to me that this regulation will matter too much either way.
- mofosyne 7y ago
  If the phone manufacturers care enough, they can always pay the fine per device
  - fiter 7y ago
    I believe it is the customer who will pay the fine. The manufacturers may have a different number of sales due to the higher price that the customer will have to pay.
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  I recognise that, but I once again point to our experience with non-standardised cables in the past. In theory, those cables could have introduced new capabilities. In practice, they really didn't. Cables got much better after standardisation, and the USB Group have proven to be substantially more motivated to advance standards than any of the manufacturers ever were.
quest88 7y ago
Buy a different phone that has a common port.
- wyattpeak 7y ago
  I addressed why I don't think that's a sufficient solution in my comment.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  Before the regulation, every phone I owned used a different port.
defnotashton2 7y ago
I don't understand how you can think this is needed in the slightest unless you literally can't make a decision yourself. I'm sorry but you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. This just simply isn't a problem, it's not a quality of life issue. It's just not. Buy cables with breakout mini, c, and tbunderbolt for 5$. Solved. This type of regulation will kill the west. The amount of money and waste it cost to create this regulation will far exceed any value it ever adds in terms of measurable productivity. Not to mention that innovation is killed with this type of approach... USB standards change for reasons.. But hey I'm glad you can borrow 100% of all of your friends cables to charge your phone rather than 90% today.... ️
- thomasahle 7y ago
  > you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations. I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.
  - vineyardmike 7y ago
    Sounds like every other phone should actually switch to lightning to solve your mini jack issue. The prevalence of iPhone-ready cables proves that the ubiquity of iPhone cables is adequate- maybe even better than USB C in some markets.
    - dijit 7y ago
      But it has a patent which does not allow unlimited use. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en Also; iPhone domination is not nearly as prevalent outside of the US.
MockObject 7y ago
I want to agree. But then I realize how any times a day I'm forced to dismiss pesky cookie warnings, and I wonder what unintended consequences will arise from this cable ruling too. Sure, none come to mind right now, but then, I never though I'd be groaning past two dozen cookie dialogs per day, either.

lallysingh 7y ago

Agreed. Also let's remember that Apple makes a pretty penny off of all those cables and chargers.

Lio 7y ago
More worrying to me, the charging port on this iPhone is wearing out. Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone. Lightning is a crap proprietary design from my point of view. If it was USB-C I could just change the cable.
- dimman 7y ago
  Your statement would make more sense if USB-C somehow magically would be immune to wear, but it’s not.
  - eurleif 7y ago
    You didn't understand this sentence: "Simply buying a new cable does nothing to fix that because the springs are in the phone." With Lightning, the springs are in the phone. With USB-C, the springs are in the cable. Springs are a moving part, and thus especially vulnerable to wear. Replacing a cable is cheaper than replacing a phone.
    - dimman 7y ago
      I did. The springs wearing out very much means bad contact at the contact points, we do agree there. However the receiver end with gold plated contacts points do also wear out. I’ve yet to see anything pointing towards springs wearing out before the gold plated areas (that is being worn by friction each insertion/removal) do. I’ve got a Lightning cable with worn out gold plated contact points, the springs in the phone are perfectly fine. My point being that without some reliable statistics pointing to springs being way more susceptible to wear than gold plated contact points, it doesn’t make any difference. (FWIW: I currently work with factory equipment for PCB production testing and bad contact due to oxidation and wear is a much bigger issue than springs going bad, but that’s just my experience.)
georgespencer 7y ago
Folks keep asserting this. Do you have any evidence to support this view?
- michaelt 7y ago
  It's quite well documented that manufacturers have to pay Apple to use lightning connectors, under the MFi scheme. While Apple doesn't issue a price sheet publicly it's been widely reported [1] as $4 per lightning connector - and that in the past it's been as much as $10 per device. $4 per cable in licensing fees for every single cable sold sounds pretty nice to me. I can understand Apple wanting to keep that. [1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/02/07/apple-lowers-mfi-lightening-licensing-fees-paving-way-for-more-affordable-ios-accessories- https://appleinsider.com/articles/14/02/07/apple-lowers-mfi-...
  - AdamJacobMuller 7y ago
    > $4 per cable That seems high considering that Anker (chosen as a cheap but good company presumably not dodging Apple's licensing scheme) is selling lightning cables on Amazon for 8 bucks [1] Amazon Basics has them for 6.50 [2] I don't think they are sending 50% and 75% of their gross to Apple. 1> https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Powerline-Lightning-Probably-Certified/dp/B06XFK2H8Z https://www.amazon.com/Anker-Powerline-Lightning-Probably-Ce... 2> https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Certified/dp/B07DC4RYCG https://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Lightning-USB-Cable-Cert...
    - lallysingh 7y ago
      Why not? The cables are probably purchased from a few bulk vendors and sold after the license fees are paid. That's still 10+% margin on a low risk product. Apple charges 30% for the app store, and that's very little overhead for then.
      - georgespencer 7y ago
        > and that's very little overhead for then. Do you actually know this or are you making an assumption? The App store seems to me like it would have some significant overheads both in cost and executional complexity. This[1] article posits that Apple made $4.2bn p.a. from app store revenue share in the period 2008 - 2018. Here are some of the things I would put into the cost lines for Apple's app store P&L (the company operates a combined P&L): 1. Multiple data centres dedicated to the app store and routing third-party notifications. That's both hosting of the apps and ongoing cost associated with e.g. push notifications, software updates. Each of these data centres has energy, staff, hardware costs. That is to say: there is both opex and capex here, which means Apple isn't only netting ongoing costs from revenue but also thinking about the cost of the capital invested in infrastructure up front. 2. The card processing charges associated with customers buying the app in the first place, and subsequent in-app purchases. 3. The cost of Apple's App Review Teams (three dedicated offices: Cork, Shanghai, Sunnyvale). That's 300 people.[2] There are costs behind them, too (for example: recruitment, HR, management). 4. Product and engineering costs associated with the team Apple has working on internal systems and services dedicated to app review. 5. An apportionment of costs associated with customers seeking technical support in-store and online due to third-party apps. 6. An apportionment of costs associated with the development and maintenance of services and APIs which Apple develops and makes available to app developers. (For example, sign-on with Apple.) In 2018 the app store had seen 130 billion apps downloaded[3], with an average app size of 38mb[4]. That's 4.94 exabytes of data excluding updates. Microsoft for many years charged Xbox developers for certification of games and patches, in part because of the bandwidth costs of distributing those patches to its customers, but also because providing this sort of service is mired by multiple perilous overheads -- which, I have to say, people on the web tend to misunderstand/ignore/dismiss. I think what you might mean to say is that the app store is still a wildly profitable endeavour for Apple. I actually don't know if that's true or not. I know that Apple doesn't usually do things for free or at break even, but equally they run a combined P&L because breaking out the profitability of every single revenue line is very difficult. In this instance, you could say: iPhone is a very profitable product, and app store is part of that. But dismissing the overheads or complexity of delivering a consumer app store on this scale seems clumsy, at best. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itunes-app-store-music-services-businesses https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/20/18273179/apple-icloud-itu... [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-process-for-the-app-store-works.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/how-apples-app-review-proces... [3] https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind-10-years-ios-app-store/ https://www.appannie.com/en/insights/market-data/data-behind... [4] https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/ https://sweetpricing.com/blog/2017/02/average-app-file-size/
sneak 7y ago
https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-you/ https://sneak.berlin/20190330/apple-is-not-trying-to-screw-y...

fiter 7y ago

Maybe it doesn't matter to most people anymore, but these ports are for more than charging. This regulation could stifle using this port for other features. That said, it's pretty obvious where everything is going (wireless), so it's not clear to me that this regulation will matter too much either way.

mofosyne 7y ago
If the phone manufacturers care enough, they can always pay the fine per device
- fiter 7y ago
  I believe it is the customer who will pay the fine. The manufacturers may have a different number of sales due to the higher price that the customer will have to pay.
wyattpeak 7y ago
I recognise that, but I once again point to our experience with non-standardised cables in the past. In theory, those cables could have introduced new capabilities. In practice, they really didn't. Cables got much better after standardisation, and the USB Group have proven to be substantially more motivated to advance standards than any of the manufacturers ever were.

quest88 7y ago

Buy a different phone that has a common port.

wyattpeak 7y ago
I addressed why I don't think that's a sufficient solution in my comment.
Can_Not 7y ago
Before the regulation, every phone I owned used a different port.

defnotashton2 7y ago

I don't understand how you can think this is needed in the slightest unless you literally can't make a decision yourself. I'm sorry but you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. This just simply isn't a problem, it's not a quality of life issue. It's just not. Buy cables with breakout mini, c, and tbunderbolt for 5$. Solved. This type of regulation will kill the west. The amount of money and waste it cost to create this regulation will far exceed any value it ever adds in terms of measurable productivity. Not to mention that innovation is killed with this type of approach... USB standards change for reasons.. But hey I'm glad you can borrow 100% of all of your friends cables to charge your phone rather than 90% today.... ️

thomasahle 7y ago
> you can buy a USB cable or adapter to charge any phone in the world at any gas station, or corner convince store. And that's exactly because of the first round of EU standardisation. The gas station now has to stock only USB and Apple. If we still had different cables for every single brand of phone, there's no way you'd be able to get them all at most, if at any, gas stations. I recently had to get a new USB-c to minijack cable. I had to go through four stores, each stocking just lightning to minijack cables, before I found one I could buy. If Apple changed to USB-C that wouldn't have happened.
- vineyardmike 7y ago
  Sounds like every other phone should actually switch to lightning to solve your mini jack issue. The prevalence of iPhone-ready cables proves that the ubiquity of iPhone cables is adequate- maybe even better than USB C in some markets.
  - dijit 7y ago
    But it has a patent which does not allow unlimited use. https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US9077794B2/en Also; iPhone domination is not nearly as prevalent outside of the US.

MockObject 7y ago

I want to agree. But then I realize how any times a day I'm forced to dismiss pesky cookie warnings, and I wonder what unintended consequences will arise from this cable ruling too. Sure, none come to mind right now, but then, I never though I'd be groaning past two dozen cookie dialogs per day, either.