14 ms·

Apple Lightning (2020)

279 points by aix1 4y ago

aix1 4y ago
Reverse engineering of Apple Lightning
turbobooster 4y ago
Really cool. Will this new? info be able to help Apple fans in any way? Still wondering when they will go USB-C.
- ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
  > Still wondering when they will go USB-C. The EU is forcing them to do so by mid-2024, so it is widely believed that the iPhone 15 will be USB-C. The Siri Remote and AirPods charging cases already are.
  - ehhthing 4y ago
    iPad Pros also use USB C, so they already have the requite support on the portable electronics side. Right now it seems mostly a transition for the phone accessories. Personally, I think apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while on iPhone. They waited until the EU actually passed legislation so they could find a person to point fingers at when their customers complained about accessories breaking compatibility.
    - Hamuko 4y ago
      All iPad models use USB-C now. The only caveat to that is that when they introduced the new iPad model with USB-C, they kept the old model as part of the line-up and that old model still has Lightning.
      - youngtaff 4y ago
        There’s some variation between them when it comes to software though - with custom USB drivers only being available for the M1 based iPads that are supported via USBDriverKit I’ve got an iPad mini and what I really want is a USB oscilloscope that works with it
    - masklinn 4y ago
      > iPad Pros also use USB C, so they already have the requite support on the portable electronics side. It's always been there, lightning is just a connector, the physical protocol is USB. > Personally, I think apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while on iPhone. Yes, but also after the DC -> Lightning transition they kinda promised there would be no new transition for a while, which was pretty safe at the time, but USB-C landed a few years later. I actually expected the iPhone 14 to switch, as 2022 is the 10 years anniversary of Lightning, and about how long the Dock Connector lasted (although technically it survived until this year and the discontinuation of the iPod Touch).
      - realityking 4y ago
        > although technically it survived until this year and the discontinuation of the iPod Touch The iPod Touch has been using Lightning since the 5th generation released in 2012.
        diroussel 4y ago
        When it was announced by apple they said the 30-pin connector has lasted a decade, and lightning was the connector for the next decade. That was September 2012. The decade is up. Personally I would be happy to keep lightning. It’s simple, it works. I have many lightning cables. If I see I lightning cable I know exactly what it’s for. With USB-C you can’t know the capability of the cable by looking at it. But I suppose lightning has had it’s term in office and it’s time to move on.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - dymk 4y ago
    They’ll just go wireless and remove the port entirely
    - nolok 4y ago
      If Apple answer to that regulation is to go wireless and use a system that's compatible with other brands, that is a massive victory for the EU and the planet in terms of reduced waste. The goal was to reduce waste and they already included in the same regulation that if companies don't agree on a common tech for wireless (like it is now) but go their own way to sell exclusive ones that can't be used with other brands then they would regulate that too.
      - threeseed 4y ago
        iPhones are compatible with the Qi standard which is limited to 7.5 watts. MagSafe however can charge up to 15 watts. So in some respects it is still a proprietary connector.
        sofixa 4y ago
        The Qi 1.2 standard is up to 15 watts.
        threeseed 4y ago
        Which was released in 2015 and Apple still does not support. I doubt they will let anything compete with MagSafe short of more EU regulation.
        krzyk 4y ago
        Qi supports at least Baseline Power Profile (which is 5 W) and the Extended Power Profile (which is 15W). I'm not sure what and why Apple did to introduce 7.5W which is proprietary Apple extension.
      - dymk 4y ago
        Charging cables contribute such a minuscule amount to landfills it’s laughable. It’s feel good legislation that distracts from real environmentally conscious efforts.
  - terramex 4y ago
    > AirPods charging cases already are They are not. Even latest models from September still use Lightning and wireless only.
    - gorbypark 4y ago
      Sadly true. I was planning on buying the new AirPods Pro’s as the rumor mill was saying they’d be USB-C, but alas they are still lightning. Weirdly enough the new AppleTV 4K remote is USB-C (both were released at the same time). I guess it makes sense to keep the AirPods on lightning as long as the iPhone is. Hopefully if the iPhone 15 is USB-C they will release a new version of the AirPods with USB-C, too. Until then I’m sticking with my 8 euro Xiaomi Bluetooth earbuds.
      - SSLy 4y ago
        The usb-c apple TV remote was shown about a month later than the stoll lighting airpods pro 2.
        gorbypark 4y ago
        Ah yes, you are correct. I'm not sure why I thought that as I clearly remember them being two events now that you've made me think about it!
      - addaon 4y ago
        The Beats Fit Pro are USB-C, use the same chipset as the AirPods Pro, and are (for my particular ears) much more comfortable.
        diebeforei485 4y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt: they use the same chipset as the old AirPods Pro (H1), not the new H2 that's used in the latest AirPods Pro.
  - saiya-jin 4y ago
    > The Siri Remote and AirPods charging cases already are. that's patently not true, bought latest airpods pro last week to my wife and it still has that obsolete lightning port
    - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
      My bad, I saw a headline about it, but it was a one-off retrofit: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/10/usb-c-airpods/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/10/usb-c-airpods/ It is in the works, though: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23298151/apple-usb-c-airpods-charging-case https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23298151/apple-usb-c-airpo...
- whalesalad 4y ago
  I have a usb-c iPad. I do prefer the lightning connector but usb-c is a close second and leaps and bounds better than the previous usb phone interfaces.
dang 4y ago
Discussed at the time: Apple Lightning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705546 - July 2020 (229 comments)
smilekzs 4y ago
On a related tangent: I'm really puzzled by these PWM-based _digital_ signaling protocols --- more so (apparently in this case) where the period isn't even fixed. The most prominent example is probably the WS2812 RGB LED, a.k.a. NeoPixel. I can get it when a PWM line carries an analog-ish duty cycle signal, but using positive and negative _widths_ to signal bit-for-bit when you control both sides of the link doesn't make sense to me engineering-wise --- if not for speed (think USB3+), not for robustness (think something like Ethernet), and not for impl simplicity (think I2C/SPI/SDIO), then for what? Maximum pain when implemented by a third party? (/s but not really)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- aix1 4y ago
  Is it this protocol we're talking about? https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812.pdf https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812.pdf (Your comment piqued my curiosity and I looked it up.) I think the desire to only use a single wire for signalling is understandable, at least in setups where there are physical wires, rather than tracks on a flex PCB, running from LED to LED. Since every rising edge is the start of a new bit, encoding each bit with an H followed by an L makes the signal self-clocking. With this, the two sides don't need very accurate -- or shared -- clocks. With the tolerances specified in the datasheet, to tell a zero from one the receiver only needs to tell whether a pulse is shorter (T0H) or longer (T1H) that 0.5us. T0L and T1L are indistinguishable (their allowed durations overlap) and don't need to be measured by the receiver. That said, I do agree that it's weird that they weren't chosen such that T0H+T0L=T1H+T1L at the centre of the tolerance range.
  - userbinator 4y ago
    That said, I do agree that it's weird that they weren't chosen such that T0H+T0L=T1H+T1L at the centre of the tolerance range. It's likely they intended them to be the same, but for whatever reason the design characterisation discovered the distribution of periods are actually slightly different from the ideal design, so instead of trying to do a potentially very expensive redesign, they just documented the reality and left it at that.
foobarbecue 4y ago
I guess it shouldn't matter... but why does this author omit the period at the end of each paragraph? It irks me.
- wizardforhire 4y ago
  Only the author knows, but if I’m to infer it’s a habit picked up from text messaging as to not show aggression? https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-periods-in-texts-1843744818 https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-periods-in-texts-1843744818
  - fsckboy 4y ago
    or he could be an old Algol programmer, and considers the period to be a statement separator, unnecessary/redundant at the end of paragraphs
userbinator 4y ago
There's a lot more information on this stuff in the Chinese and Vietnamese part of the internet, the part that Apple's lawyers can't easily reach (nor Google and most other mainstream search engines these days, for better or worse.) Repair/thirdparty accessory industries are also increasingly keeping what they've RE'd to themselves because they know they're fighting a war against Apple with what they've found, and no one is going to dare pop the golden goose. If the references to authentication and certificates weren't enough, there is definitely some DRM crypto going on in there. Yet the Chinese were able to clone the 1-wire authentication chip within a week or so of the official products' release.
- WaxProlix 4y ago
  This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles. If a proprietary cable auth chip can get reversed that hard - why not an "open spec" ev charging protocol/cable/adapter?
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles. Some jurisdictions take stealing energy as a crime. Germany, for example, has up to five years of prison on the books [1]. Kids, don't mess around with energy if you don't exactly know what the f..k you are doing and know the legal and technical risks involved. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__248c.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__248c.html
    - gsich 4y ago
      That law doesn't seem to apply.
      - brookst 4y ago
        I think the point was that stealing energy is likely to be seen as a crime in general, not that this specific law applies to this specific hypothetical. In general stealing anything is frowned upon and is at best a temporary imbalance in technical ability to steal versus economic incentives to stop theft.
keepquestioning 4y ago
Apple Lightning was better than micro USB, but surely not better than USB-C (a standard which apple itself helped promulgate). The king is dead. Long live the king.
- dijit 4y ago
  biggest problem i have is: if there is some new better standard can we ever move to it? micro-USB would likely not have improved much without some kind of competition. a big part of why USB-C is reversible was because Apple (and others) made reversible connectors and people showed a lot of preference for that.
  - mort96 4y ago
    Do we need something better or is USB-C "good enough"? Micro-USB was clearly terrible and had to be replaced that much was clear since its very introduction, but USB-C seems pretty good. I don't see it as desirable to move to something "better" in the coming decades, considering the immense cost of switching connector interface on something like this. (That cost also applies to micro-USB FWIW, micro-USB is just so bad that it's worth it.)
    - dijit 4y ago
      I can already imagine that USB-C could be superseded by something that allows surface mounting the pins (similar to magsafe 1&2? like the old pebble watches had: https://www.joom.com/sv/products/1491901009384399338-201-1-26341-1267484219 https://www.joom.com/sv/products/1491901009384399338-201-1-2... ). USB-Cs limitations (that I am already aware of) are: that it consumes a lot of internal space on devices (which we’re feeling less and less as our phones get bigger: but our watches are relegated to wireless charging with no data pins for example), that it's not clear what cable/device can do what (something original USB tried to address with "host" and "client" connector classes) and that it handles comparatively fewer insertion/removal cycles (than lightning, at least). Regardless: I’m not sure that I am ever happy saying something is “good enough” in perpetuity, even if I cant see all the potential shortcomings of device requirements right now. You are absolutely right though, the switching cost is high: and monopoly makes it higher. (FWIW I agree with the EU on this decision, I remember phones before the common charger mandate and that was a nightmare)
7373737373 4y ago
I upvoted this immediately just because I liked the design of the website. In a way, web design is a kind of new rhetorics
amelius 4y ago
Who cares about proprietary standards? Build and sell something for this connector and you'll be sued into oblivion by Apple's lawyers.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Yes because USB C is an open source standard that anyone can freely implement…
  - explodingwaffle 4y ago
    …uh, yeah, it is: https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-connector-specification-release-22 https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-c...
    - scarface74 4y ago
      > All implementation examples and reference designs contained within this Specification are included as part of the limited patent license for those companies that execute the USB 3.0
      - explodingwaffle 4y ago
        True, though I imagine the agreement you’re thinking of isn’t the one they’re talking about here. https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-30-adopters-agreement https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-30-adopters-agreeme... is the agreement- it’s royalty free, basically “sign here, don’t patent our stuff”. Not “open source”, but it’s pretty reasonable for what you get IMO- we live in a world all about IP. Many international standards are worse. Plus, it’s not like they’re gonna sue you if you don’t sign it, unless you attempt patent shenanigans. The $$$$ agreements for VIDs and trademark rights on the other hand… can’t say I’m too fond of those ones.
cainxinth 4y ago
I was disappointed the article didn’t include details about the physical connector. Lighting’s performance specs might be outdated, but I’ve always liked it’s physical interface. It’s rugged, reliable, simple, and pops in with satisfying but subtle tactile feedback.
- t3rabytes 4y ago
  Agree, I do enjoy the feeling of plugging in a Lightning cable more than a USB C cable, but the spring-loaded mechanism wears over time and eventually there’s no snap at all.
  - xvaier 4y ago
    From my experience, when there is no more snap it tends to be an accumulation of dust and grime in the port preventing the cable from fully seating. I usually clear it out carefully with a sim card ejection tool.
    - mikepurvis 4y ago
      Yup, have done this many times; my phone is definitely due for it.
    - plasticchris 4y ago
      I use a sharpened wooden toothpick to prevent any possibility of shorting the pins
      - jmkb 4y ago
        I've had good luck with poster-tack goo... just have to make sure not to leave any behind.
      - somehnguy 4y ago
        Probably a good precaution to take - but I've always recklessly used a paperclip. Been doing it since the first Lightning connector devices came out and have never had any negative effects from doing so. Seems pretty robust.
chazeon 4y ago
See also related: The Hitchhacker’s Guide to iPhone Lightning and JTAG Hacking [1] on DEF CON 30 [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8p3Oi4DL0eI https://youtube.com/watch?v=8p3Oi4DL0eI

279 points by aix1 4y ago

aix1 4y ago

Reverse engineering of Apple Lightning

turbobooster 4y ago

Really cool. Will this new? info be able to help Apple fans in any way? Still wondering when they will go USB-C.

ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
> Still wondering when they will go USB-C. The EU is forcing them to do so by mid-2024, so it is widely believed that the iPhone 15 will be USB-C. The Siri Remote and AirPods charging cases already are.
- ehhthing 4y ago
  iPad Pros also use USB C, so they already have the requite support on the portable electronics side. Right now it seems mostly a transition for the phone accessories. Personally, I think apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while on iPhone. They waited until the EU actually passed legislation so they could find a person to point fingers at when their customers complained about accessories breaking compatibility.
  - Hamuko 4y ago
    All iPad models use USB-C now. The only caveat to that is that when they introduced the new iPad model with USB-C, they kept the old model as part of the line-up and that old model still has Lightning.
    - youngtaff 4y ago
      There’s some variation between them when it comes to software though - with custom USB drivers only being available for the M1 based iPads that are supported via USBDriverKit I’ve got an iPad mini and what I really want is a USB oscilloscope that works with it
  - masklinn 4y ago
    > iPad Pros also use USB C, so they already have the requite support on the portable electronics side. It's always been there, lightning is just a connector, the physical protocol is USB. > Personally, I think apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while on iPhone. Yes, but also after the DC -> Lightning transition they kinda promised there would be no new transition for a while, which was pretty safe at the time, but USB-C landed a few years later. I actually expected the iPhone 14 to switch, as 2022 is the 10 years anniversary of Lightning, and about how long the Dock Connector lasted (although technically it survived until this year and the discontinuation of the iPod Touch).
    - realityking 4y ago
      > although technically it survived until this year and the discontinuation of the iPod Touch The iPod Touch has been using Lightning since the 5th generation released in 2012.
      - diroussel 4y ago
        When it was announced by apple they said the 30-pin connector has lasted a decade, and lightning was the connector for the next decade. That was September 2012. The decade is up. Personally I would be happy to keep lightning. It’s simple, it works. I have many lightning cables. If I see I lightning cable I know exactly what it’s for. With USB-C you can’t know the capability of the cable by looking at it. But I suppose lightning has had it’s term in office and it’s time to move on.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- dymk 4y ago
  They’ll just go wireless and remove the port entirely
  - nolok 4y ago
    If Apple answer to that regulation is to go wireless and use a system that's compatible with other brands, that is a massive victory for the EU and the planet in terms of reduced waste. The goal was to reduce waste and they already included in the same regulation that if companies don't agree on a common tech for wireless (like it is now) but go their own way to sell exclusive ones that can't be used with other brands then they would regulate that too.
    - threeseed 4y ago
      iPhones are compatible with the Qi standard which is limited to 7.5 watts. MagSafe however can charge up to 15 watts. So in some respects it is still a proprietary connector.
      - sofixa 4y ago
        The Qi 1.2 standard is up to 15 watts.
        threeseed 4y ago
        Which was released in 2015 and Apple still does not support. I doubt they will let anything compete with MagSafe short of more EU regulation.
      - krzyk 4y ago
        Qi supports at least Baseline Power Profile (which is 5 W) and the Extended Power Profile (which is 15W). I'm not sure what and why Apple did to introduce 7.5W which is proprietary Apple extension.
    - dymk 4y ago
      Charging cables contribute such a minuscule amount to landfills it’s laughable. It’s feel good legislation that distracts from real environmentally conscious efforts.
- terramex 4y ago
  > AirPods charging cases already are They are not. Even latest models from September still use Lightning and wireless only.
  - gorbypark 4y ago
    Sadly true. I was planning on buying the new AirPods Pro’s as the rumor mill was saying they’d be USB-C, but alas they are still lightning. Weirdly enough the new AppleTV 4K remote is USB-C (both were released at the same time). I guess it makes sense to keep the AirPods on lightning as long as the iPhone is. Hopefully if the iPhone 15 is USB-C they will release a new version of the AirPods with USB-C, too. Until then I’m sticking with my 8 euro Xiaomi Bluetooth earbuds.
    - SSLy 4y ago
      The usb-c apple TV remote was shown about a month later than the stoll lighting airpods pro 2.
      - gorbypark 4y ago
        Ah yes, you are correct. I'm not sure why I thought that as I clearly remember them being two events now that you've made me think about it!
    - addaon 4y ago
      The Beats Fit Pro are USB-C, use the same chipset as the AirPods Pro, and are (for my particular ears) much more comfortable.
      - diebeforei485 4y ago
        For the avoidance of doubt: they use the same chipset as the old AirPods Pro (H1), not the new H2 that's used in the latest AirPods Pro.
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  > The Siri Remote and AirPods charging cases already are. that's patently not true, bought latest airpods pro last week to my wife and it still has that obsolete lightning port
  - ThePowerOfFuet 4y ago
    My bad, I saw a headline about it, but it was a one-off retrofit: https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/10/usb-c-airpods/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/05/10/usb-c-airpods/ It is in the works, though: https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23298151/apple-usb-c-airpods-charging-case https://www.theverge.com/2022/8/9/23298151/apple-usb-c-airpo...
whalesalad 4y ago
I have a usb-c iPad. I do prefer the lightning connector but usb-c is a close second and leaps and bounds better than the previous usb phone interfaces.

dang 4y ago

Discussed at the time: Apple Lightning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705546 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23705546 - July 2020 (229 comments)

smilekzs 4y ago

On a related tangent: I'm really puzzled by these PWM-based _digital_ signaling protocols --- more so (apparently in this case) where the period isn't even fixed. The most prominent example is probably the WS2812 RGB LED, a.k.a. NeoPixel. I can get it when a PWM line carries an analog-ish duty cycle signal, but using positive and negative _widths_ to signal bit-for-bit when you control both sides of the link doesn't make sense to me engineering-wise --- if not for speed (think USB3+), not for robustness (think something like Ethernet), and not for impl simplicity (think I2C/SPI/SDIO), then for what? Maximum pain when implemented by a third party? (/s but not really)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aix1 4y ago
Is it this protocol we're talking about? https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812.pdf https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/WS2812.pdf (Your comment piqued my curiosity and I looked it up.) I think the desire to only use a single wire for signalling is understandable, at least in setups where there are physical wires, rather than tracks on a flex PCB, running from LED to LED. Since every rising edge is the start of a new bit, encoding each bit with an H followed by an L makes the signal self-clocking. With this, the two sides don't need very accurate -- or shared -- clocks. With the tolerances specified in the datasheet, to tell a zero from one the receiver only needs to tell whether a pulse is shorter (T0H) or longer (T1H) that 0.5us. T0L and T1L are indistinguishable (their allowed durations overlap) and don't need to be measured by the receiver. That said, I do agree that it's weird that they weren't chosen such that T0H+T0L=T1H+T1L at the centre of the tolerance range.
- userbinator 4y ago
  That said, I do agree that it's weird that they weren't chosen such that T0H+T0L=T1H+T1L at the centre of the tolerance range. It's likely they intended them to be the same, but for whatever reason the design characterisation discovered the distribution of periods are actually slightly different from the ideal design, so instead of trying to do a potentially very expensive redesign, they just documented the reality and left it at that.

foobarbecue 4y ago

I guess it shouldn't matter... but why does this author omit the period at the end of each paragraph? It irks me.

wizardforhire 4y ago
Only the author knows, but if I’m to infer it’s a habit picked up from text messaging as to not show aggression? https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-periods-in-texts-1843744818 https://lifehacker.com/dont-use-periods-in-texts-1843744818
- fsckboy 4y ago
  or he could be an old Algol programmer, and considers the period to be a statement separator, unnecessary/redundant at the end of paragraphs

userbinator 4y ago

There's a lot more information on this stuff in the Chinese and Vietnamese part of the internet, the part that Apple's lawyers can't easily reach (nor Google and most other mainstream search engines these days, for better or worse.) Repair/thirdparty accessory industries are also increasingly keeping what they've RE'd to themselves because they know they're fighting a war against Apple with what they've found, and no one is going to dare pop the golden goose. If the references to authentication and certificates weren't enough, there is definitely some DRM crypto going on in there. Yet the Chinese were able to clone the 1-wire authentication chip within a week or so of the official products' release.

WaxProlix 4y ago
This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles. If a proprietary cable auth chip can get reversed that hard - why not an "open spec" ev charging protocol/cable/adapter?
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > This makes me hopeful that VIN spoofing on Tesla superchargers with a cloned adapter will work at some point for other vehicles. Some jurisdictions take stealing energy as a crime. Germany, for example, has up to five years of prison on the books [1]. Kids, don't mess around with energy if you don't exactly know what the f..k you are doing and know the legal and technical risks involved. [1] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__248c.html https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__248c.html
  - gsich 4y ago
    That law doesn't seem to apply.
    - brookst 4y ago
      I think the point was that stealing energy is likely to be seen as a crime in general, not that this specific law applies to this specific hypothetical. In general stealing anything is frowned upon and is at best a temporary imbalance in technical ability to steal versus economic incentives to stop theft.

keepquestioning 4y ago

Apple Lightning was better than micro USB, but surely not better than USB-C (a standard which apple itself helped promulgate). The king is dead. Long live the king.

dijit 4y ago
biggest problem i have is: if there is some new better standard can we ever move to it? micro-USB would likely not have improved much without some kind of competition. a big part of why USB-C is reversible was because Apple (and others) made reversible connectors and people showed a lot of preference for that.
- mort96 4y ago
  Do we need something better or is USB-C "good enough"? Micro-USB was clearly terrible and had to be replaced that much was clear since its very introduction, but USB-C seems pretty good. I don't see it as desirable to move to something "better" in the coming decades, considering the immense cost of switching connector interface on something like this. (That cost also applies to micro-USB FWIW, micro-USB is just so bad that it's worth it.)
  - dijit 4y ago
    I can already imagine that USB-C could be superseded by something that allows surface mounting the pins (similar to magsafe 1&2? like the old pebble watches had: https://www.joom.com/sv/products/1491901009384399338-201-1-26341-1267484219 https://www.joom.com/sv/products/1491901009384399338-201-1-2... ). USB-Cs limitations (that I am already aware of) are: that it consumes a lot of internal space on devices (which we’re feeling less and less as our phones get bigger: but our watches are relegated to wireless charging with no data pins for example), that it's not clear what cable/device can do what (something original USB tried to address with "host" and "client" connector classes) and that it handles comparatively fewer insertion/removal cycles (than lightning, at least). Regardless: I’m not sure that I am ever happy saying something is “good enough” in perpetuity, even if I cant see all the potential shortcomings of device requirements right now. You are absolutely right though, the switching cost is high: and monopoly makes it higher. (FWIW I agree with the EU on this decision, I remember phones before the common charger mandate and that was a nightmare)

7373737373 4y ago

I upvoted this immediately just because I liked the design of the website. In a way, web design is a kind of new rhetorics

amelius 4y ago

Who cares about proprietary standards? Build and sell something for this connector and you'll be sued into oblivion by Apple's lawyers.

scarface74 4y ago
Yes because USB C is an open source standard that anyone can freely implement…
- explodingwaffle 4y ago
  …uh, yeah, it is: https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-connector-specification-release-22 https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-type-cr-cable-and-c...
  - scarface74 4y ago
    > All implementation examples and reference designs contained within this Specification are included as part of the limited patent license for those companies that execute the USB 3.0
    - explodingwaffle 4y ago
      True, though I imagine the agreement you’re thinking of isn’t the one they’re talking about here. https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-30-adopters-agreement https://www.usb.org/document-library/usb-30-adopters-agreeme... is the agreement- it’s royalty free, basically “sign here, don’t patent our stuff”. Not “open source”, but it’s pretty reasonable for what you get IMO- we live in a world all about IP. Many international standards are worse. Plus, it’s not like they’re gonna sue you if you don’t sign it, unless you attempt patent shenanigans. The $$$$ agreements for VIDs and trademark rights on the other hand… can’t say I’m too fond of those ones.

cainxinth 4y ago

I was disappointed the article didn’t include details about the physical connector. Lighting’s performance specs might be outdated, but I’ve always liked it’s physical interface. It’s rugged, reliable, simple, and pops in with satisfying but subtle tactile feedback.

t3rabytes 4y ago
Agree, I do enjoy the feeling of plugging in a Lightning cable more than a USB C cable, but the spring-loaded mechanism wears over time and eventually there’s no snap at all.
- xvaier 4y ago
  From my experience, when there is no more snap it tends to be an accumulation of dust and grime in the port preventing the cable from fully seating. I usually clear it out carefully with a sim card ejection tool.
  - mikepurvis 4y ago
    Yup, have done this many times; my phone is definitely due for it.
  - plasticchris 4y ago
    I use a sharpened wooden toothpick to prevent any possibility of shorting the pins
    - jmkb 4y ago
      I've had good luck with poster-tack goo... just have to make sure not to leave any behind.
    - somehnguy 4y ago
      Probably a good precaution to take - but I've always recklessly used a paperclip. Been doing it since the first Lightning connector devices came out and have never had any negative effects from doing so. Seems pretty robust.

chazeon 4y ago

See also related: The Hitchhacker’s Guide to iPhone Lightning and JTAG Hacking [1] on DEF CON 30 [1]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=8p3Oi4DL0eI https://youtube.com/watch?v=8p3Oi4DL0eI