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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 ca

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 11mo 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
- bigstrat2003 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‽ Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
- morshu9001 11mo ago
  Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.
- kakacik 11mo ago
  Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for. This is business 101.
- xp84 11mo ago
  > “Apple came under fire … [for 30-pin]” So freaking what? Since when does Apple care about what customers whine about? They didn’t actually give a flying fig when users moaned about 30-pin to Lightning, did they? Show me how they apologized or walked that back. Same for the headphone jack. Same for the one-port MacBook 12”. And the MacBook keyboard - until class action got them - they put that garbage in several generations of laptops! The point being, they could have adopted USB-C whenever they wanted to and let the whiners whine — they just didn’t want to. Stop anthropomorphizing Tim Cook. Apple doesn’t do anything because they feel bad about customer complaints. Apple does things for profit. Profit only. If you disagree, may I point to their recent zeal to buddy up with DJT. Is that a principled embrace of that dude? Or are they just weighting anything that isn’t profit at zero and then making the rational decision from there.
JustExAWS 11mo ago
There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning. And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?
- cyberax 11mo ago
  No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.
  - JustExAWS 11mo ago
    I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.
    - morshu9001 11mo ago
      Same here. They tended to stop working, not because of a shoddy cable but because the phone rejects it.
- morshu9001 11mo ago
  USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.
  - JustExAWS 11mo ago
    You didn’t real need a transition, just USB C to USB 2.0 cords and USB C to HDMI cords. Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.
    - 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 11mo 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
bigstrat2003 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‽ Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
morshu9001 11mo ago
Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.
kakacik 11mo ago
Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for. This is business 101.
xp84 11mo ago
> “Apple came under fire … [for 30-pin]” So freaking what? Since when does Apple care about what customers whine about? They didn’t actually give a flying fig when users moaned about 30-pin to Lightning, did they? Show me how they apologized or walked that back. Same for the headphone jack. Same for the one-port MacBook 12”. And the MacBook keyboard - until class action got them - they put that garbage in several generations of laptops! The point being, they could have adopted USB-C whenever they wanted to and let the whiners whine — they just didn’t want to. Stop anthropomorphizing Tim Cook. Apple doesn’t do anything because they feel bad about customer complaints. Apple does things for profit. Profit only. If you disagree, may I point to their recent zeal to buddy up with DJT. Is that a principled embrace of that dude? Or are they just weighting anything that isn’t profit at zero and then making the rational decision from there.

JustExAWS 11mo ago

There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning. And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?

cyberax 11mo ago
No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.
- JustExAWS 11mo ago
  I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.
  - morshu9001 11mo ago
    Same here. They tended to stop working, not because of a shoddy cable but because the phone rejects it.
morshu9001 11mo ago
USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.
- JustExAWS 11mo ago
  You didn’t real need a transition, just USB C to USB 2.0 cords and USB C to HDMI cords. Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.
  - morshu9001 11mo ago