6 ms·

Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here

by usrnm 11mo ago

llm_nerd 11mo ago
Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede. To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
- dickersnoodle 11mo ago
  It's conceivably politically incorrect to use this reference, but Apple was begging the EU not to throw them into that briar patch.
  - llm_nerd 11mo ago
    Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.
    - gambiting 11mo ago
      >> which they were already almost completely done doing Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
      - llm_nerd 11mo ago
        Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change. And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users. In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
        koyote 11mo ago
        > In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible? USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.
        MBCook 11mo ago
        GP meant Lightning. It was reversible. You are correct, the dock connector for was not. And they couldn’t go to USB-C instead of Lightning initially as Lightning came out first.
        llm_nerd 11mo ago
        Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018. A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years. The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.
        koyote 11mo ago
    - stouset 11mo ago
      I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer). The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
      - tristanj 11mo ago
        My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device. EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.
        raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?
        tristanj 11mo ago
        My statements are substantiated by sources going back almost a decade. See my other comment for details. And when you view what Apple is doing from their long-term vision of the iPhone becoming a transparent piece of glass, it starts making sense.
        raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        Substantiated by rumors - isn’t that an oxymoron?
- frizlab 11mo ago
  Absolutely. It is excessively obvious and I don’t understand how not much more of a common take that is.
- OhNoNotAgain_99 11mo ago
  [dead]
- icehawk 11mo ago
  People spent a whole decade complaining about the iPod dock -> Lightning change. I'd wait to blame the EU also.
- ricw 11mo ago
  Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department. They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
  - giantrobot 11mo ago
    USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
    - KK7NIL 11mo ago
      > USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that? > The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean. This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable. Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
      - jdiff 11mo ago
        My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface. There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
        nl 11mo ago
        My lightning connector on my iPhone 12 is completely unreliable - I need to twist the phone against the cable to get it to change. Fortunately MagSafe works fine!
- singpolyma3 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - jolux 11mo ago
    What are you talking about? The iPhone has been using USB-C globally since the iPhone 15 in 2023.
    - singpolyma3 11mo ago
      Heh. Maybe I just haven't met anyone with such a new iPhone yet
- hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
  > but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.
  - nozzlegear 11mo ago
    Apple likely didn't want the precedent or bad press of the EU mandating changes in their supply chain.
  - systemtest 11mo ago
    Do you have any sources that "Apple fought the EU" regarding USB-C?
- morshu9001 11mo ago
  They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
  - llm_nerd 11mo ago
    >iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control. Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over. The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.
    - morshu9001 10mo ago
      Their own cables were the most fragile things ever invented. There's no reason for that other than selling more cables. And it's not just about revenue, it's about control/lockin. It's striking, iPhones have always been top except for charging. They were always dead cause the cables were so unreliable and difficult to find. Finally that's fixed, rare thanks to the EU.
  - JimDabell 11mo ago
    You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables? Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.
    - brailsafe 11mo ago
      > You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables? Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse. That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them. > How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables? A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
- PunchyHamster 11mo ago
  EU kinda failed with it once before, they pushed for phone vendors to get to common standard https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_11_75 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"
itopaloglu83 11mo ago
Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that. I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.
- notyourwork 11mo ago
  Who is stopping someone from competing against ASML?
  - itopaloglu83 11mo ago
    Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple? Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them. Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms. Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think they have to be even broken up due to their monopolistic behaviors.
    - lmm 11mo ago
      > Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple? Apple's dominant market position and abuse of network effects via their proprietary standards, like the one we're talking about from this article. > Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation No-one's arguing for any equivalent of that to happen to Apple. Just that when there's an open standard for inter-device communication, they should follow that. Imagine if ASML-manufactured processors wouldn't work with standard DDR5, only with some special memory chips that only ASML could manufacture, that would be the equivalent to what Apple is doing. Apple should enjoy the profits from when they make better products that win on their merits. But they should have to compete fairly.
      - 11mo ago
stephen_g 11mo ago
That did turn a huge number of chargers and accessories into e-waste though...
- dialup_sounds 11mo ago
  Lightning is just the snowcap on a mountain of Mini- and Micro-USB.
- adzm 11mo ago
  With the benefit of reduced waste in the future, though
- systemtest 11mo ago
  Chargers of that era typically had a USB A port and can still be used with an A to C cable
- avh02 11mo ago
  probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
- gruturo 11mo ago
  You know you can get a lightning-to-C adapter for very little, right? Here you go, under $2 each: https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-Connector/dp/B0D4JYJ6NX https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-C... (probably under $1 each if you have the patience to look for them in other sites) And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter
- xp84 11mo ago
  LIghtning due to its DRM chips (and the delicateness of Apple’s “aesthetics-first” first-party cables) was not a long-lived cable. We threw away probably 2-3 per year during the whole era. Throwing away the last couple before their natural death, when I finally eradicated Lightning from our home, was no great loss.
vineyardmike 11mo ago
Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users. The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.
- monocasa 11mo ago
  I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector. Do you have a citation for what you're saying?
  - systemtest 11mo ago
    Phil Schiller announced Lightning as the modern connector for the next decade back in September 2012 during the release of the iPhone 5.
    - monocasa 11mo ago
      That's not a contract.
    - ciupicri 11mo ago
      Here's a video of that moment: https://youtu.be/CqOZBearWd4 https://youtu.be/CqOZBearWd4
  - xp84 11mo ago
    Shocker, they never responded to back up their claim!
- pavlov 11mo ago
  Chinese cable manufacturers don't need contract guarantees to compete for the lucrative iPhone user market...
systemtest 11mo ago
Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17. Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
- scbzzzzz 11mo ago
  Wow , you need lot of homework to do. You missed the whole timeline of events, backlash with apple and usbc and just looking at headlines. Or either misrepresenting the facts because you are a fan boy of a trillion dollar company. Please dont if its latter.
  - systemtest 11mo ago
    Do you have any source that states that Apple was forced? Given that they switched the iPhone to USB-C multiple product iterations before it was required makes it seem to be that they were not forced.
- scbzzzzz 11mo ago
  Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable. Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass. It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified. Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c

Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here

by usrnm 11mo ago

Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here

llm_nerd 11mo ago

Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede. To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.

dickersnoodle 11mo ago
It's conceivably politically incorrect to use this reference, but Apple was begging the EU not to throw them into that briar patch.
- llm_nerd 11mo ago
  Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.
  - gambiting 11mo ago
    >> which they were already almost completely done doing Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
    - llm_nerd 11mo ago
      Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change. And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users. In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
      - koyote 11mo ago
        > In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible? USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.
        MBCook 11mo ago
        GP meant Lightning. It was reversible. You are correct, the dock connector for was not. And they couldn’t go to USB-C instead of Lightning initially as Lightning came out first.
        llm_nerd 11mo ago
        Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018. A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years. The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.
        koyote 11mo ago
  - stouset 11mo ago
    I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer). The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
    - tristanj 11mo ago
      My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device. EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.
      - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?
        tristanj 11mo ago
        My statements are substantiated by sources going back almost a decade. See my other comment for details. And when you view what Apple is doing from their long-term vision of the iPhone becoming a transparent piece of glass, it starts making sense.
        raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
        Substantiated by rumors - isn’t that an oxymoron?
frizlab 11mo ago
Absolutely. It is excessively obvious and I don’t understand how not much more of a common take that is.
OhNoNotAgain_99 11mo ago
[dead]
icehawk 11mo ago
People spent a whole decade complaining about the iPod dock -> Lightning change. I'd wait to blame the EU also.
ricw 11mo ago
Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department. They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
- giantrobot 11mo ago
  USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
  - KK7NIL 11mo ago
    > USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that? > The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean. This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable. Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
    - jdiff 11mo ago
      My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface. There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
      - nl 11mo ago
        My lightning connector on my iPhone 12 is completely unreliable - I need to twist the phone against the cable to get it to change. Fortunately MagSafe works fine!
singpolyma3 11mo ago
[flagged]
- jolux 11mo ago
  What are you talking about? The iPhone has been using USB-C globally since the iPhone 15 in 2023.
  - singpolyma3 11mo ago
    Heh. Maybe I just haven't met anyone with such a new iPhone yet
hshdhdhj4444 11mo ago
> but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.
- nozzlegear 11mo ago
  Apple likely didn't want the precedent or bad press of the EU mandating changes in their supply chain.
- systemtest 11mo ago
  Do you have any sources that "Apple fought the EU" regarding USB-C?
morshu9001 11mo ago
They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
- llm_nerd 11mo ago
  >iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control. Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over. The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.
  - morshu9001 10mo ago
    Their own cables were the most fragile things ever invented. There's no reason for that other than selling more cables. And it's not just about revenue, it's about control/lockin. It's striking, iPhones have always been top except for charging. They were always dead cause the cables were so unreliable and difficult to find. Finally that's fixed, rare thanks to the EU.
- JimDabell 11mo ago
  You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables? Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.
  - brailsafe 11mo ago
    > You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables? Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse. That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them. > How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables? A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
PunchyHamster 11mo ago
EU kinda failed with it once before, they pushed for phone vendors to get to common standard https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_11_75 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1... didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"

itopaloglu83 11mo ago

Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that. I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.

notyourwork 11mo ago
Who is stopping someone from competing against ASML?
- itopaloglu83 11mo ago
  Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple? Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them. Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms. Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think they have to be even broken up due to their monopolistic behaviors.
  - lmm 11mo ago
    > Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple? Apple's dominant market position and abuse of network effects via their proprietary standards, like the one we're talking about from this article. > Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation No-one's arguing for any equivalent of that to happen to Apple. Just that when there's an open standard for inter-device communication, they should follow that. Imagine if ASML-manufactured processors wouldn't work with standard DDR5, only with some special memory chips that only ASML could manufacture, that would be the equivalent to what Apple is doing. Apple should enjoy the profits from when they make better products that win on their merits. But they should have to compete fairly.
    - 11mo ago

stephen_g 11mo ago

That did turn a huge number of chargers and accessories into e-waste though...

dialup_sounds 11mo ago
Lightning is just the snowcap on a mountain of Mini- and Micro-USB.
adzm 11mo ago
With the benefit of reduced waste in the future, though
systemtest 11mo ago
Chargers of that era typically had a USB A port and can still be used with an A to C cable
avh02 11mo ago
probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
gruturo 11mo ago
You know you can get a lightning-to-C adapter for very little, right? Here you go, under $2 each: https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-Connector/dp/B0D4JYJ6NX https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-C... (probably under $1 each if you have the patience to look for them in other sites) And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter
xp84 11mo ago
LIghtning due to its DRM chips (and the delicateness of Apple’s “aesthetics-first” first-party cables) was not a long-lived cable. We threw away probably 2-3 per year during the whole era. Throwing away the last couple before their natural death, when I finally eradicated Lightning from our home, was no great loss.

vineyardmike 11mo ago

Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users. The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.

monocasa 11mo ago
I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector. Do you have a citation for what you're saying?
- systemtest 11mo ago
  Phil Schiller announced Lightning as the modern connector for the next decade back in September 2012 during the release of the iPhone 5.
  - monocasa 11mo ago
    That's not a contract.
  - ciupicri 11mo ago
    Here's a video of that moment: https://youtu.be/CqOZBearWd4 https://youtu.be/CqOZBearWd4
- xp84 11mo ago
  Shocker, they never responded to back up their claim!
pavlov 11mo ago
Chinese cable manufacturers don't need contract guarantees to compete for the lucrative iPhone user market...

systemtest 11mo ago

Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17. Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?

scbzzzzz 11mo ago
Wow , you need lot of homework to do. You missed the whole timeline of events, backlash with apple and usbc and just looking at headlines. Or either misrepresenting the facts because you are a fan boy of a trillion dollar company. Please dont if its latter.
- systemtest 11mo ago
  Do you have any source that states that Apple was forced? Given that they switched the iPhone to USB-C multiple product iterations before it was required makes it seem to be that they were not forced.
scbzzzzz 11mo ago
Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable. Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass. It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified. Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c