4 ms·

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...

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...