6 ms·

I would assume the vast majority of people aren't doing anything serious with their USB ports on a phone....

xp84 1y ago
It did take 8 hours to do a migration of data from my wife's 256GB iPhone 14 (lightning) to her iPhone 15 Pro this year, so that's at least one "serious" thing. I am so glad to be rid of that cursed Lightning port. Now I just have to come up with a good excuse to replace the younger child's tablet, despite it working fine. It is so frustrating to have to maintain special charging cables just for certain devices especially when you know it was a deliberate and cynical choice by the vendor. Thank goodness for the EU forcing this matter.
- tamimio 1y ago
  Use landrop, been some times since I used wires to transfer data. https://landrop.app https://landrop.app
- sgarland 1y ago
  IMO, Lightning was a better physical connector. But a near-universal standard is better.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Lightning puts the main failure modes device-side. Apple’s learnings, which they contributed to USBIF as part of the USB-C effort, were to put the mechanical failure points in the cable, not the device.
    - Uvix 1y ago
      USB-C may have added a mechanical failure point in the cable, but the port is still fragile. Possibly more so than Lightning, with the delicate little tab inside.
    - Shekelphile 1y ago
      I have no clue how you're drawing that conclusion. The lightning connector is indisputably more durable than USB-C and failures of lightning ports outside of extreme abuse is pretty much unheard of.
      - 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
        I think people argue this because the little pins for lightning are in your device. If these break there’s no fix. The flexible pins on USBC is in the cable. Do if the pins break, you get a new cable. Thought arguably, you now have this thin plastic flappy bit. But none of the parts that are meant to flex are in your device.
- ggreer 1y ago
  Taking eight hours to migrate the data is almost certainly a software issue. Assuming the phone is completely full, transferring 256GB over USB 2.0 (480Mbit/sec, or 60MB/sec) should take about an hour and 15 minutes.
  - BobbyTables2 1y ago
    I suspect the flash storage can’t sustain 60MB/sec writes indefinitely…
    - ggreer 1y ago
      The iPhone line has used NVMe drives for a decade. Even the iPhone X can do sustained writes of over 100MB/sec.
    - Dylan16807 1y ago
      The amazonbasics 256GB microsd is faster than that. I really doubt the flash in an iPhone is worse. And the speed you should actually expect from USB 2.0 is more like 35MB/s so that's even easier for flash to handle.
  - frollogaston 1y ago
    USB 2.0 doesn't realistically do 480mbit/s I thought
    - delfinom 1y ago
      It absolutely can. Many years ago the limitation was PC mobos sucked and the likewise flash drives sucked. They marketed it but it was often just a peak. Nowadays I can fully saturate the 480 mbit.
      - userbinator 1y ago
        No, real-world throughput is closer to 40MB/s (320Mbps) due to protocol overhead, which is relatively high.
  - 1y ago
- brookst 1y ago
  The EU did not force the matter. They trotted out in front of the parade and pretended to lead it. Apple switched a year before required, and not coincidentally, ten years after promising that Lightning would be the connector “for the next decade” so as to reduce fears from those who were angry about being “forced” to replace their 30-pin peripherals. I don’t know why tech enthusiasts tend toward conspiratorial thinking, but certainly if Apple had obsoleted Lightning after only 8 years, many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding class action lawsuits over such a greedy deceit.
  - dangus 1y ago
    I think you need a pretty good amount of willful naivety to think that Apple didn’t make the switch with such coincidental timing to EU law changes purely out of the love of their customers. Let’s not forget the very same year they stopped including the charging brick they started including USB-C to lightning cables in the box, so that their supposedly environmentally friendly practice forced their users to buy a new brick unless they saved previous cables. Why didn’t they switch to USB-C back then? To make users do another transition a few short years later? They’re aren’t exactly a company with a track record of maintaining standards for the convenience and backward compatibility for their customers. This idea that they kept lightning around to maintain legacy standards doesn’t really track with the rest of their behavior. They have a 20+ year old reputation for abruptly dropping and replacing ports.
    - Shekelphile 1y ago
      > I think you need a pretty good amount of willful naivety to think that Apple didn’t make the switch with such coincidental timing to EU law changes purely out of the love of their customers. The designs are finalized years in advance. Apple would have made the choice to ship USB-C before the EU mandate was even proposed.
      - dangus 1y ago
        “Years in advance” but a new phone design comes out every year. Doesn’t pass the smell test. If an individual hacker can change the lightning port to USB-C in the phone (this really happened) then Apple can definitely make the design change within a short timeframe like a month.
scarface_74 1y ago
I have a portable external monitor with two USB C ports. It can get power and video from one USB port. I can plug it up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the same standard USB cord. With a phone, it can only power the display up to 50% brightness by itself. If I plug power into the second USB C port, it will show the display up to 100% and charge my phone. https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT Having USB C also means I can use a standard USB C to HDMI cord for TVs and use the same cord for my computer. Not to mention all of the other standard USB protocols like audio, mass storage, Ethernet, etc. that just work.
- ThatPlayer 1y ago
  It's also funny that the Lightning to HDMI adapters had to add hardware to decode a compressed video stream from the Lightning port. It's basically a wired AirPlay adapter. That's why they cost so much.
  - dwaite 1y ago
    Lightning was meant to be a software-defined serial data interface, I suspect because of the confusing breaking mess that was the 30 pin adapter over its lifetime. The digital logic to work with hardware was pushed outside the phone into the cable.
frollogaston 1y ago
I'm not doing anything serious with it, but photo/video transfer takes annoyingly long
makeitdouble 1y ago
IMHO it is a learned habit that will change as limitations are lifted. Plugging a SD card reader to one's phone instead of pulling out the laptop to push the images to the cloud for instance. You do it once, and will be immediately convince of the advantages.

xp84 1y ago

It did take 8 hours to do a migration of data from my wife's 256GB iPhone 14 (lightning) to her iPhone 15 Pro this year, so that's at least one "serious" thing. I am so glad to be rid of that cursed Lightning port. Now I just have to come up with a good excuse to replace the younger child's tablet, despite it working fine. It is so frustrating to have to maintain special charging cables just for certain devices especially when you know it was a deliberate and cynical choice by the vendor. Thank goodness for the EU forcing this matter.

tamimio 1y ago
Use landrop, been some times since I used wires to transfer data. https://landrop.app https://landrop.app
sgarland 1y ago
IMO, Lightning was a better physical connector. But a near-universal standard is better.
- brookst 1y ago
  Lightning puts the main failure modes device-side. Apple’s learnings, which they contributed to USBIF as part of the USB-C effort, were to put the mechanical failure points in the cable, not the device.
  - Uvix 1y ago
    USB-C may have added a mechanical failure point in the cable, but the port is still fragile. Possibly more so than Lightning, with the delicate little tab inside.
  - Shekelphile 1y ago
    I have no clue how you're drawing that conclusion. The lightning connector is indisputably more durable than USB-C and failures of lightning ports outside of extreme abuse is pretty much unheard of.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 1y ago
      I think people argue this because the little pins for lightning are in your device. If these break there’s no fix. The flexible pins on USBC is in the cable. Do if the pins break, you get a new cable. Thought arguably, you now have this thin plastic flappy bit. But none of the parts that are meant to flex are in your device.
ggreer 1y ago
Taking eight hours to migrate the data is almost certainly a software issue. Assuming the phone is completely full, transferring 256GB over USB 2.0 (480Mbit/sec, or 60MB/sec) should take about an hour and 15 minutes.
- BobbyTables2 1y ago
  I suspect the flash storage can’t sustain 60MB/sec writes indefinitely…
  - ggreer 1y ago
    The iPhone line has used NVMe drives for a decade. Even the iPhone X can do sustained writes of over 100MB/sec.
  - Dylan16807 1y ago
    The amazonbasics 256GB microsd is faster than that. I really doubt the flash in an iPhone is worse. And the speed you should actually expect from USB 2.0 is more like 35MB/s so that's even easier for flash to handle.
- frollogaston 1y ago
  USB 2.0 doesn't realistically do 480mbit/s I thought
  - delfinom 1y ago
    It absolutely can. Many years ago the limitation was PC mobos sucked and the likewise flash drives sucked. They marketed it but it was often just a peak. Nowadays I can fully saturate the 480 mbit.
    - userbinator 1y ago
      No, real-world throughput is closer to 40MB/s (320Mbps) due to protocol overhead, which is relatively high.
- 1y ago
brookst 1y ago
The EU did not force the matter. They trotted out in front of the parade and pretended to lead it. Apple switched a year before required, and not coincidentally, ten years after promising that Lightning would be the connector “for the next decade” so as to reduce fears from those who were angry about being “forced” to replace their 30-pin peripherals. I don’t know why tech enthusiasts tend toward conspiratorial thinking, but certainly if Apple had obsoleted Lightning after only 8 years, many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding class action lawsuits over such a greedy deceit.
- dangus 1y ago
  I think you need a pretty good amount of willful naivety to think that Apple didn’t make the switch with such coincidental timing to EU law changes purely out of the love of their customers. Let’s not forget the very same year they stopped including the charging brick they started including USB-C to lightning cables in the box, so that their supposedly environmentally friendly practice forced their users to buy a new brick unless they saved previous cables. Why didn’t they switch to USB-C back then? To make users do another transition a few short years later? They’re aren’t exactly a company with a track record of maintaining standards for the convenience and backward compatibility for their customers. This idea that they kept lightning around to maintain legacy standards doesn’t really track with the rest of their behavior. They have a 20+ year old reputation for abruptly dropping and replacing ports.
  - Shekelphile 1y ago
    > I think you need a pretty good amount of willful naivety to think that Apple didn’t make the switch with such coincidental timing to EU law changes purely out of the love of their customers. The designs are finalized years in advance. Apple would have made the choice to ship USB-C before the EU mandate was even proposed.
    - dangus 1y ago
      “Years in advance” but a new phone design comes out every year. Doesn’t pass the smell test. If an individual hacker can change the lightning port to USB-C in the phone (this really happened) then Apple can definitely make the design change within a short timeframe like a month.

scarface_74 1y ago

I have a portable external monitor with two USB C ports. It can get power and video from one USB port. I can plug it up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the same standard USB cord. With a phone, it can only power the display up to 50% brightness by itself. If I plug power into the second USB C port, it will show the display up to 100% and charge my phone. https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT Having USB C also means I can use a standard USB C to HDMI cord for TVs and use the same cord for my computer. Not to mention all of the other standard USB protocols like audio, mass storage, Ethernet, etc. that just work.

ThatPlayer 1y ago
It's also funny that the Lightning to HDMI adapters had to add hardware to decode a compressed video stream from the Lightning port. It's basically a wired AirPlay adapter. That's why they cost so much.
- dwaite 1y ago
  Lightning was meant to be a software-defined serial data interface, I suspect because of the confusing breaking mess that was the 30 pin adapter over its lifetime. The digital logic to work with hardware was pushed outside the phone into the cable.

frollogaston 1y ago

I'm not doing anything serious with it, but photo/video transfer takes annoyingly long

makeitdouble 1y ago

IMHO it is a learned habit that will change as limitations are lifted. Plugging a SD card reader to one's phone instead of pulling out the laptop to push the images to the cloud for instance. You do it once, and will be immediately convince of the advantages.