If USB-C is so inferior to Lightning, why is Apple switching to USB-C across the board, worldwide?
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Apple Stops Selling iPhone 14 and iPhone SE in More EU Countries
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If USB-C is so inferior to Lightning, why is Apple switching to USB-C across the board, worldwide?
Obviously.
But when the government does things like decide which charging ports consumer electronic devices are allowed to use and what private APIs companies have to open up they stifle innovation.
🙄
Or maybe he and Apple’s product designers didn’t think the trade off was worth it yet. Remember last time they switched to a cable (that was demonstrably better than the one it was replacing) they were raked over the coals. USB-C is worse than lightening at being a charging cable and they’d promised to stick to lightening for ten years. I suspect they were waiting for USB-C to hit a critical mass and the EU just pushed the date forward by a year or two.
It’s obvious to most Apple was going to switch. Just because they didn’t switch as fast as you would have liked doesn’t mean they’re stupid, it means they have a different opinion on what is best for their customers. Which is their right to do and should be their decision (not the government’s) to make. If you don’t like it buy another product.
Posting again:
Innovation" is not the be-all, end-all. I consider sustainability, energy efficiency and an environmental mindset to be far and above more important.
I don't think the EU directive will stifle anything except profit, but even if it did, I don't really care.
Adding this. If innovation = proprietary. I'll gladly take less innovation.
And mandating a switch to USB-C does absolutely nothing for any of that. Remember the EU wanted micro-usb to be the standard. Are you upset they failed? Wouldn’t that have been better for sustainability?
We’ll never have a phone thinner than a USB-C port, for example. And again, Apple wasn’t making significant money on Lightening.
Have to agree to disagree here. Think there would be significantly less innovation without proprietary solutions and I’m glad that innovation exists.
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Are you thinking of the North American CCS1 connector? This is physcially very differently to the European CCS2 connector - and I certainly agree that CCS1 is pretty bad and unreliable. But CCS2 is much more similar, mechanically, to NACS than to CCS1. It uses an electromagnetic locking mechanism just like NACS, not the janky external latching mechanism of CCS1.
NACS is simply not needed in Europe, or in any country that already has standardised on CCS2. The pain of switching at this point, and forcing a layer of incompatibility and adapters on everyone, would vastly outweigh any perceived benefit of NACS.
North America was in a different situation because it had two competing standards, and it's a very good thing that it's now standardising on one of them. But Europe already has a single universal standard that has been supported by all car manufacturers, including Tesla, for many years.
With Apple going USB-C globally, they can reap the cost savings and simplicity benefits of using the same connector across their product lineups..
A win win for consumers and Apple alike, especially since they made essentially no money off the old Lightning port anyhow.... "mice nuts" to quote a friend here on the forum
A win win for consumers and Apple alike, especially since they made essentially no money off the old Lightning port anyhow.... "mice nuts" to quote a friend here on the forum
Last point on this then I’m going to disengage because we clearly fundamentally disagree on the role of government when it comes to stuff like this, but as someone who would like as thin of a phone as I can get, I don’t think the EU, who thought standardizing on micro-usb was a good idea, should be the ones deciding that for the rest of us. Apple, their competitors, and the market should.
Sure we could. Such a phone would just have to use wireless charging exclusively. It’s long been rumoured that Apple has been experimenting with “portless” phone designs.
And the difference in thickness between a USB-C port and a Lightning port is less than 1mm anyway.
“With a few days worth of work”. You are heavily overestimating how quickly governments work.🙄 A glacier probably moves faster.
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Again my issue isn’t that I prefer lightening. I actually prefer USB-C because I have a lot of devices that use it.
I just don’t think the government should be mandating what port devices use.
And for 2027, EU will by law enforce all the mobile phones to be sold in the region to have replaceable batteries, so for sure in that year we’ll see completely new designs apart to the current ones.
I'm pretty sure the current iphone designs already satisfy the requirement - they don't have to be hot swappably replacable, just doable without undue difficulty iirc.
- ok, double checking requirements, perhaps some tweaks are needed.
Actually, no, I think the current batteries do qualify as sufficiently good to be used as is, and not need to be end user replacable, merely service replacable.
Just out of curiosity, in which way lightning is better than usb c as a connector? I don’t get the point 🤔
This. It’s very handy to use just uno charger and one cable for everything
EU is not a government. They are the regulator and they are supposed to take care of people’s needs
All USB-C cables (that you could go to the store and purchase) support charging phones.
Incorrect (I've told you before) - as evidenced by them launching new Lightning peripherals through 2021 and 2022.
And they introduced USB-C only on the phones they'll sell as new devices in 2025.
Obviously not - as this news article proves.
👉 They withdrew iPhone products from sale literally at the deadline.
Despite continuing to sell them in other regions.
Despite the legislation being known for years.
Despite having introduced USB-C in their notebooks almost ten years ago.
They clearly weren't "moving away from Lightning" before the regulation.
USB-C allows for both higher current and power - so it isn't.
USB-C is good enough for the foreseeable future and purpose.
Just like electrical wiring standards are.
That doesn't rhyme with your own assertions (in other threads) about how small and insignificant the EU market is to a company like Apple.
And what are you imagining anyway? How much smaller, how much more power power or data would a redesigned connector provide anyway? USB-C has enough headroom for a generation.
They have.
The only holdout in smartphones has been that American company with a fruit-shaped logo, clinging to its proprietary older, less capable connector - cause it made them 100s of millions in earnings.
While you're clinging to this argument, the EU did, in fact, not mandate it.
They allowed a better connector to emerge and mature.
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False. ALL USB-C cables support charging up to at least 60W (3A @ 20V). And ALL USB-C cables support at least USB 2.0 480 Mbps data transfer. These are the minimum specs for every USB-C cable ever made.
That is not correct. As with any spec, there are a variety of options that can be used. The spec specifically allows for data only specialty cables, as well as allows for power only plug applications.
In normal consumer practice, the USB-C cable (i.e. one with USB-C at both ends) offerings will likely cover the gamut, with at least some charging capability but possible lacking data or other features.
Part of the problem is a cable manufacturer need not follow the USB-C cable spec even though they may have USB-C connectors at each end.
A consumer may think a cable is a cable, and then longer what is wrong with their device when they use a USB 2.0 spec cable and data transfer takes much longer, or why a cable doesn't work with CarPlay because it doesn't support OTG.
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It's a witch hunt all right. And yes, the rule only applies to new devices. Older devices already on the shelves will be sold until everything is gone.
It doesn’t sit as well as lightening, I’ve already had several instances when I’ve woken up to a phone at 10% battery because the usb-c connector didn’t catch - something that never happened during the 10+ years I used lightening connectors. I also have a couple of usb-c cords that won’t connect to the phone no matter what I do. Male-pin designs are also more robust.
It’s not a major downgrade, to be clear, but plugging in, checking to make phone is actually charging, then putting phone down is a slightly worse experience than plugging the phone in and just setting it down KNOWING it’s going to be charging. Again, I prefer USB-C because I have other stuff that charges with it, but it’s demonstrably slightly worse at actually being a connector.
Agree 100% - but the
Semantics. It’s an entity that makes rules for the area under its jurisdiction. And I’d argue when it comes to regulating big tech, they may think they’re taking care of the people’s needs but they are actually making things worse.
Given how most other popular consumer tech products has moved to USB-C charging and even you (by your own acknowledgement) prefer USB-C over Lightning, they actually did make things better and took care of the people’s needs.
I don't think it some sort of a witch hunt; it applies to all manufacturers, not just Apple. It also extends beyond phones, which probably has a larger impact given how micro-USB was a very popular charging plug for many cheap electronic devices.
I don't agree that is evidence Apple didn't intend to migrate to USB-C, since that was 3-4 years before USB-C was mandated. I think, given Apple's migration to USB-C across its product line, it was part of the long term plan, perhaps speeded up by a year or so due to EU action. I mean, it's not like a new phone is designed in the year it is released, there are roadmaps for feature introduction, which can change based on market and regulatory conditions.
One reason the phones were last may be the infrastructure around Lightening peripherals was very device specific, unlike USB-C on computers where often simply getting new cable or widely available adapters allowed you to easily use or replace older USB-A cables. Apple may simply wanted to avoid the need for dongles on iPhones for as long as possible to avoid disrupting the user experience.
Makes sense since they would still be on the market whereas the older phones would no longer be sold new at retail by Apple. Apple kept some 13 and 14 models as lower cost options when the 15 came out, and the 13 was due to be dropped in 2025 anyway, so doing it a few months early is no big deal, as was killing the SE line until a low cost replacement model comes out.
In my experience, I have had Lightening connectors that would not charge as well unless plugged in with the 'right' side up.
I would agree with that, and in the Phones case it made cleaning out the pocket lint that sometimes caused wonky connections, I would hesitate trying to clean a USB-C port the same way.
As an engineer, I don't understand why the didn't make the female end the one on the device, so a broken pin connector ruins a cable, not a device connection.To me, that was a regression from the old DB-X pin designs used in specs such as RS-232.
That doesn’t help if when I plug it in my phone doesn’t start charging which has happened more frequently in the year and three months my phone has used usb-c than the 10+ years I used lightening.
And electrical wiring could be better had it been allowed to evolve. Wouldn’t it be great if every power plug could also provide data, for example? Who knows what better solution we could have?
I’ve never said the EU is small and insignificant. I’ve said they are smaller and more insignificant than they seem think they are, which is true. But they’re absolutely an important market and one that I’ve repeatedly said Apple isn’t going to pull out of no matter how burdensome the regulation.That doesn't rhyme with your own assertions (in other threads) about how small and insignificant the EU market is to a company like Apple.
We can’t have a device thinner than a USB-C port, for example. I don’t work at Apple or one of its competitors. But they’re absolutely more qualified to be making that decision than bureaucrats Brussels. The EU shouldn’t be enforcing an unnecessary mandate on something as unimportant as what charging ports consumer electronic devices use. They don’t know better than the companies designing these devices.
Pocket change. And said company was clearly moving to USB-C. Just not fast enough for you.
They tried to mandate it and thankfully failed. Ironically enough, they accepted a voluntary approach to the first “mandate” because, in part, they didn’t want to stifle innovation. Guess that changed in the intervening decade.
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Nope. First off, “only needing one cord” is not a need of the people. Secondly, they’ve now made significantly more difficult for a better connector to emerge. Finally, Apple was clearly already moving to USB-C, so at best the EU got them there a year or two early. Not worth the disadvantages of a mandate that stifles innovation.