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Apple finally put USB-C in new iPhone, but limited to 23-year-old USB 2.0 speeds
- afavour 3y agoTL;DR: > The iPhone 15 Pro sports Apple's new A17 Pro APU, complete with a new on-die USB controller block. However, the vanilla iPhone 15 makes do with the last-gen A16 Bionic chip, which lacks that new USB controller and only has the original Lightning controller onboard. In that context it makes more sense: the cable isn't limited to USB 2.0 speeds, it's limited to lightning cable speeds (which are the same), they literally only changed the connector. It's still annoying but it's understandable that they made the tradeoff, I imagine making a whole new "A16+USB-C controller" chipset would be expensive with little upside for most customers.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- numpad0 3y agoYou probably meant "USB 3 controller" rather than "USB-C controller", The USB-C is just the connector + tons of its own protocol headaches and a "USB-C 2.0" connector is totally allowed.
- jaywalk 3y agoRealistically, nobody who buys a non-Pro iPhone is going to care about the speed of the cable. It definitely seems like a good tradeoff to me.
- nickthegreek 3y agoAgreed. I have not read 1 article or comment in the last 5 years about people complaining about their slow iphone sync speeds. It has been a complete non-issue, but now that there is a USB end, people now find it unacceptable? Please.
- hardware2win 3y agoWhat makes you think so?
- endlessvoid94 3y agoIt's anecdote, not data, but I don't know a single person who has used their USB cable plugged into their iPhone to transfer data in a very, very long time. So it intuitively aligns with my personal life and career experience.
- unethical_ban 3y agoFilthy Android user here. I don't use NSA scanner tools or upload my sex tapes to Google's AI training model, so I sync my photos to my local NAS once a month.
- Kirby64 3y agoNot sure why you (or anyone else) needs to wait a full month to sync. Seems like a potential failure, since you could lose as much as a months worth of photos. OwnCloud or any of the other automatic, fully local syncing apps do this just fine daily. Then you sync photos/videos every time you're on your local network.
- unethical_ban 3y agoI tried owncloud once, and it was janky in my opinion. The once a month sync is an accepted risk. I also sync immediately before and after traveling.
- jwells89 3y agoThis has been my experience as well. iPads are a different story (useful for wired Sidecar, serving as a graphic tablet for a Mac, loading up large video files to watch, etc), and those have all gotten USB-C along with their chassis updates.
- wlesieutre 3y ago
- tomduncalf 3y agoAgreed, I don't think I've ever copied anything to/from my (Pro) iPhone with a cable. Obviously this might be different if you're a videographer creating huge files, but in that case you'd probably go for the Pro
- adolph 3y agoI would buy an iPhone with no openings, no ports, no speakers, no mic. (4s size pls) I never thought I wouldn’t sync my phone to a computer, but here I am. If I have to, opening the case to make a debug zif connection isn’t a big deal.
- saalweachter 3y agoIMO it's more a meh because for me (and probably 97% of phone users) it's more a piece of historical trivia that the phone's charging cable can also be used for data transfer. It would not surprise me if most iPhones go their lifetime without having data transfered over a hard wire. So why bother to put the new hotness in if it's not going to matter to almost all users?
- shultays 3y ago97% of phone users don't care about a lot of features. Let's remove them all one by one. Accessibility first!
- dv_dt 3y agoExactly what do you need the speed for was my first thought. The only thing I came up with is maybe car play, but if lighting/usb2 speeds are sufficient then it’s mostly moot that the flagship has usb3. Maybe the extra usb to lightning controller will draw some extra power.
- dataworm 3y agoIt would be expensive to make a whole new SoC, but a PCIe USB controller costs very little compared to the price of the phone. They could have used a 5 Gb/s USB controller for market segmentation, it would still be 10 times faster.
- afavour 3y ago> a PCIe USB controller costs very little compared to the price of the phone But integrating that controller into the phone? I assume there's a reason it's currently heavily integrated into the SoC and that not doing so would have drawbacks.
- user_named 3y agoCourage
- 1-6 3y agoI thought they specifically called out USB-C with USB-3. Or was it only for their Pro models? Edit: I read the edit in the post.
- tristor 3y agoThis is only true for the non-Pro models. The flagship models get USB 3.0 speeds, which seems like a fair trade-off, and it seems like it's tied to the USB controller inside the SoC, since the non-Pro models get the same SoC as the iPhone 14 Pros (last gen), it is pretty clear what happened. Nothing really to see here or complain about.
- Night_Thastus 3y agoThat 'non-pro' model is still $1,000.
- quenix 3y agoWhat? The non-pro model is $799 The pro model is $999
- prettychill 3y agothe iphone 15 starts at 799.
- horsawlarway 3y ago$800 before tax or accessories. Out the door... Minimum $900 bucks where I live. That feels close enough to a grand that trying to explain away usb 2 speeds with "But it's a budget phone!" is pretty disingenuous.
- HWR_14 3y agoAnd out the door where I live they are free (or will be in a few months) if you switch cell carriers and trade in your old phone.
- horsawlarway 3y ago> if you switch cell carriers and trade in your old phone. Soooo absolutely not free?
- ryaneager 3y agoHonestly, who cares? Does anyone even transfers data via USB from their phone anymore? It’s been 4-5 years since I’ve done that. It’s all in synced via iCloud now.
- catchnear4321 3y agobut my power cable is data shaped, and it only moves data slowly. it doesn’t matter if it is never used for that purpose. the connector lied to me, like a language model.
- AlwaysRock 3y agoWeird take. Who cares about data transfer speeds? Lots of people. Many parts of the world dont have the same cell service coverage or wifi stability you may have.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoGenuine question: How does USB 2.0 compare to Bluetooth (Airdrop) and wifi (assume local network or ad hoc, not icloud or internet) speeds on the 15 line? EDIT: TIL more about the underlying mechanics of Airdrop than I thought I would, appreciate the lesson.
- lloeki 3y agoUSB 2.0 Hi Speed is 480 Mb/s I get about that with my 13 mini on my WiFi 6 AP. BT 5.x I have no idea.
- stouset 3y agoAirdrop negotiates a WiFi connection using Bluetooth but does all the data transfer at WiFi speeds.
- kamcma 3y agoAirDrop only uses Bluetooth for handshake and configuration. Data is then transferred over Wi-Fi Direct.
- 3y ago
- ulfw 3y agoI have not connected a cable to my iPhone in years (since Magsafe launched in 2020). I haven't transferred data from/to my iPhone via cable in a decade (since Airdrop launched in 2012). So having USB-C instead of Lightning is nice for the very occasional 'i am traveling without my magsafe charger' situation. But 0.5gbit vs 10gbit USB makes zero difference if I have not transferred more than 0bit in a decade anyway. One can get angry about so many things. This ain't one of them.
- kayodelycaon 3y agoBecause Apple didn't upgrade the old A16 chip with a new usb controller. Only the A17 chip has it. All they did was swap out the connector. For phones with A16 chips, the USB-C port is just a differently shaped lightning port. Apple decided not to make a new processor for an old phone... shock and awe.
- mmastrac 3y ago> Apple decided not to make a new processor for an old phone... shock and awe. I am pretty sure that this is a new phone.
- criddell 3y agoI think they meant to say old processor or old SoC.
- mmastrac 3y agoI'm not sure your read makes sense, but I suspect the most charitable interpretation of their comment would be: "Apple is using the old stock of USB2-only processors for the non-pro phone, and it's common for the non-pro devices to use last-gen processors"
- kayodelycaon 3y agoThat’s what I meant. Oops.
- bcrosby95 3y agoThe iPhone 15 was just announced. It's not an old phone. Yeah, they decided to use and old processor on a new $800 phone that can't support something my $400 phone does. But what can you expect, they're just a poor indie company, we need to lower our expectations of them.
- slipshady 3y ago> old phone Announced yesterday Checks out!
- 1-6 3y agoOther phone manufacturers don't have any problem with including USB3 speeds on their value phones. Apple at this point is being foolish by nickel-and-diming everyone.
- foogazi 3y agofoolish or cheap ? I’d use foolish if it affected consumers purchasing decision I don’t think people buying iPhones meaningfully care about USB data transfer rates
- abind 3y agoiPad mini, which has an a15 bionic, has usb c at 5 gbps. I wonder if that’s a separate usb controller?
- dataworm 3y agoIt is, connected over PCIe.
- piyh 3y agoReal world transfer speeds are ~40 MB/s with USB 2. Wifi 6 is about ~700 MB. I struggle to find real world use cases that would hit USB 2 limits and not have wifi as an alternative. The really interesting parts of USB are display port alt mode and thunderbolt. While it's technically possible and probably valuable for millions of people for Apple to do their version of Dex, I don't ever see that happening.
- PennRobotics 3y agoAs you stated: monitor as second display, but who is actually doing this en masse?? Personally, I've only had to do this once: when my Xperia screen totally broke but I still needed to get data off.
- piyh 3y agoNot monitor as second display. Think plugging your iPhone into a docking station and having some windowed desktop environment come up.
- lloeki 3y agoWiFi 6 is in the 700Mb/s range, not MB/s. (In practice I get about 500Mb/s, so on par with USB 2.0, which is 480Mb/s)
- turquoisevar 3y agoWiFi 6 has a theoretical bandwidth of 9.6Gbps. I manage to almost saturate my 1Gbps fiber connection when doing a Speedtest close to my router, landing at about 870Mbps down/up, which seems fair with some of the overhead that comes with my specific router. If I use AirDrop to my Mac which is an ad-hoc connection on 5Ghz I consistently reach 1Gbps transfer speeds, sometimes a bit more.
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoIn my experience with close to 500GB of files - mostly smaller image files - transferred over lightning using ifuse, 2-4MB/s is closer on average.
- mikece 3y agoPersonally I'm waiting to see the iPhone SE refreshed. The last time that happened the CPU in the phone, the A15 Bionic, was the same as what was in the iPhone 13 Pro released the fall before. I'm hoping that the 4th iteration of the iPhone SE will include, if not the A17 Pro, then a slightly more modest version of the A17 that has the new USB controller (and USB-C, of course). If not then my iPhone 8 Plus will need to hold out one more year because I don't see the point of going with USB-C if the throughput is no faster than lightning when it comes to backing up all photos and video from the phone to my computers.
- jareklupinski 3y agowhile we're hoping, I'd love the Mini to come back, or for the SE to use the Mini's dimensions
- duxup 3y agoYes, a mini every … 3 years please?
- duxup 3y agoWhat is the actual impact here? What kind of time difference transferring data? It hardly ever transfer mass data from my phone, when I do I honestly don’t care how long it takes provided it is “fast enough”…
- dwnvotee 3y ago[flagged]
- travisporter 3y agough I feel so old
- morpheuskafka 3y ago> The iPhone 15 Pro sports Apple's new A17 Pro APU, complete with a new on-die USB controller block. However, the vanilla iPhone 15 makes do with the last-gen A16 Bionic chip, which lacks that new USB controller and only has the original Lightning controller onboard. What did the iPads do before A17? Did they also have this extra controller? I thought at least the Pro models already had faster speeds, so there must have been a solution already.
- masklinn 3y agoApparently they have an additional external controller. The "base" iPad only has USB2 speeds after switching to USB-C. Apparently the 6th gen mini also only has USB2 when in device mode (it has 5Gb in host mode).
- ajaimk 3y agoThis is not malicious - the USB controller is the same as the older model which only supported 2.0 speeds.
- throw378484 3y agoFor me biggest bummer is 3.0 USB speed in Pro. I expected USB 4 with external monitors, 10 Gbps ethernet, fast external storage... I used my Galaxy as a desktop for several years. I have separate workstation for dev, but as personal device it is perfect.
- blehn 3y agoOkay but how many people are actually transferring large amounts of data to and from their iPhones via cables? And on the rare occasion that they are transferring 10GB of data, it takes a minute or two? And if they're doing it frequently (presumably an amateur videographer), they'd certainly buy an iPhone Pro and probably have a USB 3 cable. Tech journalists can be so dense sometimes.
- alpaca128 3y agoWhen USB 2 came out the largest HDDs available for laptops had around 10GB capacity. This year I bought a 20TB drive. What makes you think it's fine to use 23 year old speed limits in a $800 device, let alone attacking people who expect more?
- paulmd 3y ago> What makes you think it's fine to use 23 year old speed limits in a $800 device the USB Implementation Forum, I'd expect
- iAMkenough 3y agoIf someone could provide you an accurate figure, what arbitrary number would it take for you to accept this as a valid criticism?
- foogazi 3y agoIt does not matter A) you had the same speed on existing iPhones - so it’s an upgrade you didn’t get B) you can get the iPhone Pro and pay for it
- acyou 3y agoThis sort of consumer-friendly thinking may finally tip the scales for me towards Apple. Every single time I need to charge my device, or a family member's device, or a friend's device, or another of the many devices that I have that use USB-C, I care, a lot. It's the charging, not the data transfer, that people do multiple times per day, every day, at multiple different charge points.
- ankurdhama 3y agoDoes that mean you cannot get video out over this USB 2.0 port? There are adapters that can let you connect lightning port to HDMI display.
- PaywallBuster 3y agoinsignificant for 90% of people maybe if I had macbook laptop I would connect it from time to time, but otherwise everything works fine via Wi-Fi including full system backups
- yungporko 3y agoi don't have a strong opinion either way on usb speeds because i don't understand what difference it makes anyway? i don't think there's even a way to access the file system directly. genuine question: who is transferring data to or from an iphone using a lightning cable on current iphones? what kind of data? i've used only iphone since 2015 and the only time since then when i've connected my phone to a computer was when i was playing with jailbreaking iOS 9 and none of that stuff involved transferring significant amounts of data one way or the other.
- pezdeath 3y agoPictures/Videos? 50gb of data at USB 2 speeds is minimum 14 minutes while usb 3 is 1 min 30. Real world is probably like double the time for both as usb 2.0 definitely doesn't average 480mbps
- SushiHippie 3y agoAlso I don't know how it's on apple, but on Android you can only access the files via MTP and that makes it way slower. If my android had USB2 speeds, It would probably take hours to transfer 50GB
- _23sd 3y agoIt’s annoying but pretty clearly about differentiating the Pro model, at least at first. This has been Apple’s strategy at least since the XS/XR: the high end model gets a better camera and higher performance SoC to entice consumers who want the best as well as the actual professional users. And recently they’ve apparently moved to having the base iPhone lag a year on the chip. USB3 requires a specific chip so the Pro gets it first. The question is, does the base iPhone get USB3 with the A17 series SoC next year, or does it join the camera as something to differentiate the Pro series? It would make sense to keep it in the pro model since fast USB transfers is something few consumers care about but pros care a lot about.
- paulmd 3y agothis is actually all about TSMC N3 and the problems they've been having getting it to work and yield. N3 itself is essentially canceled and split into two nodes: N3B (b for Bad), which has a small gain, and then N3E (E for Enhanced) which comes next year with the performance that was originally promised for N3 (now N3B). N3E is not design-compatible with N3B, and will yield better at lower cost (because they're replacing some DUV layers with EUV) once it's finally running. In theory. So basically this year they are releasing the A17 Pro on N3B, and the base-model phones get the old A16 (which does not have native USB3). Then probably next year they release A17 Bionic and update the base tier phones. It's also highly likely that the A17 Pro itself gets refreshed, since it will be lower cost on N3E (and this matters at Apple's scale, the validation/testing costs are worth it). And that's the point when they'll start doing M3 chips in laptops too, most likely - actually some analysts thought M3 non-Pro/Max was a possibility (smaller dies/higher yields) but I guess N3B yields are that bad.
- boesboes 3y agoI don’t even know why you would use a cable aside from charging. Seems like more apple-bad click bait to me
- st3ve445678 3y agoI guess it's a bit odd, but how many people are actually using their cable to transfer files? I cant remember that last time I did anything like that. And I would wager 95% of people only ever use their cable for charging, not file transfers.
- PrimeMcFly 3y agoThis is clearly anti-consumer and hopefully the EU holds them accountable for this.
- nicole_express 3y agoThey were required to put in USB-C by regulations; makes sense that they wouldn't actually handle anything more than Lightning could, that's definitely what they'd be using if they were still allowed to. Honestly the surprising part is that Apple never felt the need to speed up Lightning; really shows how rarely wired data transfer is done on an iPhone.
- sleepybrett 3y agoYeah the only people i've talked to that are grousing about cabled transfer speeds is photographers and videographers. Those people are buying pro phones.
- TheHappyOddish 3y agoHello, I'm not those and I am grumbling. Now you've spoken to me too.
- daft_pink 3y agoNo one cares. Most people don't use the USB cable to transfer to their iPhone anyways, because it automatically backs up to iCloud every day wirelessly, and there really isn't any reason to transfer data to an iPhone via cable. The few random people who do are probably videographers looking to transfer their large video files and buying the pro models anyways. Even android users probably aren't paying attention to what speed their USB was. I'm shocked that is even a selling point. I've been using an iPhone and iPad for about 8 years and never transferred data this way. I've only used usb for midi or keyboard inputs where data speed was not a factor.
- withinboredom 3y agoBut when you need it for that random 1-off thing, you’ll be cursing out Apple for how slow it is. Like this one time I had to transfer over air-drop to a Mac and it took hours because their Mac was too old to transfer via wire from my iPhone. Like wtaf. Edit to add. Their Mac didn’t have usb-c ports and that’s the only charger I had with me and no adapter. They were an Android user.
- quenix 3y ago> you’ll be cursing out Apple for how slow it is. Is it though? Really? 480 Mb/s is quite fast for most applications, especially those involving a smartphone. Any user with files large enough that this transfer is ostensibly slow is a videographer of some sort and has likely bought the pro model or at least planned for this event. What sort of file is a "random 1-off thing" that a casual user might need to transfer, unexpectedly, over the wire, which is so large that a speed of 0.48 gigabits/sec is extremely slow? The non-pro model can transfer a 5GB file over the wire in around a minute. Again, what is the real-world use case or scenario where a non-pro, casual user would find some random 1-off file, that is so large that the 0.48 Gbps speed is lacking?
- beaugunderson 3y agoEvery so often I transfer all of Wikipedia to my phone (using one of the Kiwix extracts, which are ~100gb). It takes forever (~1 hour). Until VERY recently (last few months) the Finder did not even have a progress bar for iPhone file transfers. Personally I am very excited for this transfer to happen over USB3 in the future.
- jobs_throwaway 3y ago[flagged]
- freedude 3y agoIt is one of the signs of a cult
- sterling6785 3y agoEvery phone that has USB 3.0, iPhone 15 Pro and the flagship Android phones, come with a 2.0 cable. You have to seek out a higher-spec cable to be able to use the 3.0. Just throwing that piece of information out into the discussion.
- jdjdjdjdjduuuu 3y ago[flagged]
- xela79 3y agolast time I connected an iphone with a cable to transfer data was 5 years ago.