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There is a mild bit of self-negation in these iPhone5 gripes: on the one hand, it's knocked for not having enough that's truly new rather than incremental; on t
by gojomo 14y ago
There is a mild bit of self-negation in these iPhone5 gripes: on the one hand, it's knocked for not having enough that's truly new rather than incremental; on the other the one completely novel break-with-the-past, the 'lightning' connector, gets singled out as a negative.
When you go with Apple, you're along for the ride on their obsolescence decisions. There is never a great time for such discontinuities: you have to take the hit sometime, and putting it off would just mean an even larger ecosystem on the original connector.
Yes, Apple has gone their own way here... but matching the commodity/common-denominator practice has never been Apple's emphasis. I know that controlling/taxing the aftermarket is one part of their choice... but the size, durability, and reversibility of the connector will be offsetting benefits. (And an off-brand micro-USB-to-lightning adapter will probably be even smaller and cheaper than the 30-pin-to-lightning adapter.)
- lucian1900 14y agoIt's still not USB, when it really should have been. There's no excuse for having a proprietary connector, now not even for Apple.
- gojomo 14y agoCould it have been as thin with USB? Could it have never required fumbling with mismatched-side-rotation in the dark? You might not like the excuses but they exist beyond "no excuse". And the required micro-USB adapter will likely be tiny and cheap: just affix it to the end of your micro-USB cord.
- bunderbunder 14y agoUSB is my least favorite connector, aside from the old iPhone connector. In all its form factors it's universally difficult to get hooked up without physically looking at the plug and the socket, and it seems to break too often. Worse yet, most people I know can barely even tell the different versions apart, and often figure out if a USB cord is compatible with a device by just trying to jam it in and see if it fits. The new lightning connector looks like it offers much better ergonomics and better durability than any of the existing USB plugs. So I'm happy to see connectors going in this direction. Let's see the USB standard copy the idea.
- rys 14y agoUSB isn't good enough to carry all of the data signals out of the device, without abusing it completely. At that point you have a good excuse for not using it.