4 ms·

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating s

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C. If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

crimsontech 7mo ago
I have tried to explain this so many times to people. You could just scrape out the lint from the lighting port with a tooth pick. The fragile part was the easily replaceable cable. Now the fragile part is in the iPhone itself.
- kalleboo 7mo ago
  Lightning had the contact springs in the phone, USB-C has the contact springs on the cable. This is the part that wears out, and USB-C moving to the cable is an improvement. Throughout its life, Lightning suffered from "black pin plague" where when springs in the port wore out, the power pin would start arcing. Now you have a cable with poor connectivity on the power pin, and you use this cable in another Apple device and it starts arcing on that device as well, causing that device to start transmitting this disease. It was a terrible design and USB-C does not have it. https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-lightning-cable-turns-black https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-ligh...
Gigachad 7mo ago
Apple was on the design committee for USB-C, they also failed to make lightning an industry standard after 10+ years. The EU didn't design the connector, they just required the industry pick a design, and USB-C is what Apple and the rest designed.
bigyabai 7mo ago
If Lightning is so important to you then you can still use Lightning-based iPhones. Nobody took away the hardware they sold you, they just mandated that the new ones adopt a common standard.
- catlikesshrimp 7mo ago
  If lightning was vastly superior, they could still have a lightning port in addition to the usb, or make a different version with their propietary port for the rest of the world. But it wasn't superior. I understand the added difficulty of making a version with a different port. Again, if it was Uber superior, it would have made for very good advertisemebt for apple.
avidiax 7mo ago
You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc. Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up. USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible. But reversing this would require that the springs on the USB-C cable are on the outside, and those are quite fragile, so that sounds like a worse idea. USB-C is mostly a good design.
- hbs18 7mo ago
  > I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.
  - catlikesshrimp 7mo ago
    Could you mention what phone models were those. I haven't seen one port go bad.
    - hbs18 7mo ago
      They were an LG Nexus 5X, a OnePlus 3T and a Xiaomi Mi 8. The ports became loose on all of them over time, especially on the OnePlus where the cable would just fall out if you held the device upright, and in its final days the Xiaomi would need the cable pushed at an angle to make a connection.
  - Dusseldorf 7mo ago
    I don't want to sound like a jerk, but have you considered that you might need to improve your putting/unplugging habits? I used to have connectors and cords break after around that much time. Around 2018 or so I bought a new set of chargers and decent quality cloth sheathed cables. Because all my cords were new, I was much more diligent about carefully plugging and unplugging (no mashing the port, no flexing across the short axis, no yanking by the cord) and eventually a habit formed. Not a single one of those cords, nor any of the ports on my phones, have broken since then. Even the daily use ones next to my bed!
raverbashing 7mo ago
Apple can't even make their strain relief on their cables work properly due to "being ugly" so preferring them to USBC is just another case of Apple-juice-kool-aid
- PunchyHamster 7mo ago
  it's ridiculus that this is still the problem ,that's no 1 cause for dead cables for our helpdesk
PunchyHamster 7mo ago
Putting spring on the connector part rather than socket part means the easily replaceable part has wear item. Lighting is designed wrong here. And our helpdesk had more broken lightning connectors than anything else in shop that's ~ 50/50 PC/Mac
- mrWiz 7mo ago
  I’m surprised to hear that it was such a common failure. I used plenty of lighting devices back in their hay day and plenty of USBC devices since they became common. I don’t tend to treat those devices gingerly and have far more issues with USBC than I ever did with Lightning, even accounting for the fact that lots of devices have USBC but only phones and mp3 players had lightning.

crimsontech 7mo ago

I have tried to explain this so many times to people. You could just scrape out the lint from the lighting port with a tooth pick. The fragile part was the easily replaceable cable. Now the fragile part is in the iPhone itself.

kalleboo 7mo ago
Lightning had the contact springs in the phone, USB-C has the contact springs on the cable. This is the part that wears out, and USB-C moving to the cable is an improvement. Throughout its life, Lightning suffered from "black pin plague" where when springs in the port wore out, the power pin would start arcing. Now you have a cable with poor connectivity on the power pin, and you use this cable in another Apple device and it starts arcing on that device as well, causing that device to start transmitting this disease. It was a terrible design and USB-C does not have it. https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-lightning-cable-turns-black https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-ligh...

Gigachad 7mo ago

Apple was on the design committee for USB-C, they also failed to make lightning an industry standard after 10+ years. The EU didn't design the connector, they just required the industry pick a design, and USB-C is what Apple and the rest designed.

bigyabai 7mo ago

If Lightning is so important to you then you can still use Lightning-based iPhones. Nobody took away the hardware they sold you, they just mandated that the new ones adopt a common standard.

catlikesshrimp 7mo ago
If lightning was vastly superior, they could still have a lightning port in addition to the usb, or make a different version with their propietary port for the rest of the world. But it wasn't superior. I understand the added difficulty of making a version with a different port. Again, if it was Uber superior, it would have made for very good advertisemebt for apple.

avidiax 7mo ago

You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc. Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up. USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible. But reversing this would require that the springs on the USB-C cable are on the outside, and those are quite fragile, so that sounds like a worse idea. USB-C is mostly a good design.

hbs18 7mo ago
> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.
- catlikesshrimp 7mo ago
  Could you mention what phone models were those. I haven't seen one port go bad.
  - hbs18 7mo ago
    They were an LG Nexus 5X, a OnePlus 3T and a Xiaomi Mi 8. The ports became loose on all of them over time, especially on the OnePlus where the cable would just fall out if you held the device upright, and in its final days the Xiaomi would need the cable pushed at an angle to make a connection.
- Dusseldorf 7mo ago
  I don't want to sound like a jerk, but have you considered that you might need to improve your putting/unplugging habits? I used to have connectors and cords break after around that much time. Around 2018 or so I bought a new set of chargers and decent quality cloth sheathed cables. Because all my cords were new, I was much more diligent about carefully plugging and unplugging (no mashing the port, no flexing across the short axis, no yanking by the cord) and eventually a habit formed. Not a single one of those cords, nor any of the ports on my phones, have broken since then. Even the daily use ones next to my bed!

raverbashing 7mo ago

Apple can't even make their strain relief on their cables work properly due to "being ugly" so preferring them to USBC is just another case of Apple-juice-kool-aid

PunchyHamster 7mo ago
it's ridiculus that this is still the problem ,that's no 1 cause for dead cables for our helpdesk

PunchyHamster 7mo ago

Putting spring on the connector part rather than socket part means the easily replaceable part has wear item. Lighting is designed wrong here. And our helpdesk had more broken lightning connectors than anything else in shop that's ~ 50/50 PC/Mac

mrWiz 7mo ago
I’m surprised to hear that it was such a common failure. I used plenty of lighting devices back in their hay day and plenty of USBC devices since they became common. I don’t tend to treat those devices gingerly and have far more issues with USBC than I ever did with Lightning, even accounting for the fact that lots of devices have USBC but only phones and mp3 players had lightning.