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by thrownthatway9 hours ago |
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upvoteby dtech8 hours ago|
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This is fully on Apple themselves. USB consortium asked apple to use lightning for what became USB-C, but Apple didn't want to give up the ecosystem control.
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upvoteby thrownthatway7 hours ago|
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What does that have to do with the EU requiring everyone to use the USB-C connector?

The EU could have made a different decision. Or not got itself involved.

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upvoteby gnabgib8 hours ago|
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You're aware the maker of the lightning connector helped produce the USB-C standard in the same year they created lightning?

> The design for the USB‑C connector was initially developed in 2012 by Apple Inc., with the help of Intel, HP Inc., Microsoft, and the USB Implementers Forum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C

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upvoteby mvdtnz8 hours ago|
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So?
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upvoteby da_chicken7 hours ago|
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USB-C is rated for 10,000 connections, while Lightning is rated for 40,000. Except if you disconnect and reconnect your phone 4 times a day every day of every year you own it, 10,000 is enough for just under 7 years. And Lighting was introduced in 2012, while USB-C was 2014. In those days, the average lifespan of a smartphone was 2.5 years. Even today, the software is only supported for 7 years at most. You don't need a connector that's going to last nearly 30 years.

And the additional durability of Lightning is itself not free. It's not cheaper than USB-C. Quite the opposite. That additional cost means that it either uses more resources to manufacture, or more resources to make the tools to manufacture. So, it's just wasteful. Lightning is "physically superior" but USB-C is better engineering.

Apple knows that. So Apple chose to go with Lightning because it was theirs, not because it was better. Because it's not really better. Not better for the customer. Or really better for business. Apple chose vendor lock-in.

Worse than that, Apple's connectors are higher durability, but their cabling itself is awful. I work at a K-12 and we were in an iPad and Chromebook pilot back in the mid 2010s that ran about 4-5 years. We had a fleet of 3500 of each. The iPads saw less than half the usage hours as the Chromebooks, but had something like triple the incidence of cable replacement. The cable insulation splits. The plasticizers degrade, the cables get really sticky or oily, and then they split and expose the braided grounding sheath. That braided cable will shock you. That was true for both student and staff devices. So they had these wonderful connectors, but the cables still failed at effectively five or six times the rate of the alternative. And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!

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upvoteby thrownthatway6 hours ago|
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> And since they were proprietary, you couldn't just buy a better cable made by someone else! You had to buy the same cable that you knew was going to fail!

Godswallop! Aftermarket Lightning cables were readily available shortly after Apple first use the the port.

Agreed though, their own Apple branded cables that came with the device are terrible, and I always just threw them straight in the bin.

And connection cycles is the wrong metric for USB-C vs Lightning. The correct metric is how many and how much side-force removals can the port withstand.

My experience shows that for USB-C the answer is wildly insufficient whereas for Lightning it’s sufficiently high enough that it won’t be a concern.

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upvoteby da_chicken2 minutes ago|
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IMX, the third party cables are fine... If you're interested only ever doing slow charging with about half of them. They were real bad when we tried them.
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upvoteby thrownthatway7 hours ago|
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It’s a weird comment.

Like yeah, Apple helped design the USB-C connector and preferred something else.

Thereby only reinforcing my point.

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