Gurman: Apple Considered Removing Lightning Connector on iPhone X

[alexgowers]

The thing about charging ports is that you either need universal adoption of wireless charging and for everyone in the world to be wasting 50+% of all power by doing so due to inefficiencies... Or you keep it and suck it up knowing your choice saved the world a whole load of waste!

Honestly if wireless charging was efficient and not inconvenient because of the HUGE pad needed for charging I'd be all for it. But just look at the massive shortcomings of wireless power for a micro second and it's a complete waste of time! It's a terrible idea all round and apple bought into the bag of lies.

Apple please go back to anything but wireless. I'd even accept magnetic contact point if it's like MagSafe, small and encapsulated. It's be perfect for water resistance and also could be retrofitted/adapted to a standard usb-c cable too!

Wireless is wasteful, basically the same as plugging in with a effective cable end that is LARGER than the device itself!! That is just idiocy. Apple will realise this mistake but a better solution would be just to implement usb-c and be done with it, even from a tech perspective it's the best possible solution right now, it's brave, courageous and forward thinking!

Remove faceID and place Touch ID under the glass. The only issue would then be where to place the front camera for a perfect iPhone design!

 

[HarryWild]

Direct USC-C input is the way to go!

 

[InuNacho]

Wireless is wasteful, basically the same as plugging in with a effective cable end that is LARGER than the device itself!! That is just idiocy. Apple will realise this mistake but a better solution would be just to implement usb-c and be done with it, even from a tech perspective it's the best possible solution right now, it's brave, courageous and forward thinking!

What, you don't want a white pancake stuck to your dash or carseat so you can charge and drive at the same time?

 

[code-m]

What, you don't want a white pancake stuck to your dash or carseat so you can charge and drive at the same time?

Lol, why would anyone want two cigarette sticks hanging out of their ears. Yet it’s a big seller for Apple.

 

[Mac 128]

Apple please go back to anything but wireless. I'd even accept magnetic contact point if it's like MagSafe, small and encapsulated. It's be perfect for water resistance and also could be retrofitted/adapted to a standard usb-c cable too!

Even if they get rid of an actual port, there will still be some way in which to connect a physical cable, if only to perform diagnostics. My guess is something like the Smart Connector, which seems not so much as a new technology Apple wanted to develop a peripheral market for, but rather a real world, proof of concept test for future implementation. Since the iPhone only supports USB 2.0 transfer speeds now, there's no reason to offer more than that level of connectivity when the primary method of charging and connecting is via wireless.

It also means people will need yet another adapter.

 

[laurim]

That may be all you care about, but that doesn't make a common use case. You would presume that they may have thought through the negatives with an approach like this and have solutions for them.

Maybe?

No I wouldn't like my phone to die when walking around a foreign city. However I currently do this a lot, and the phone works just fine without going flat all the time. (Also, it's really not the end of the world if your phone dies. Travelled in most countries in Asia for 10 months of my life and didn't even have a smartphone back then (gasp!)).

Now who’s using personal anecdotes to justify an opinion? I travel a lot, used to not have a smartphone and now I do and as a woman traveling alone in an unfamiliar city, especially at night, it’s much better to have a phone with a functioning gps and an ability to call the police than not. After a long day of taking photos, videos and whatnot, the battery dies pretty quickly. Not being able to use a portable battery to plug in and recharge so I don’t have to go all the way back to my Airbnb to recharge the phone (and watch) for a few hours is really important.

 

[dazz87]

again apple finding new ways of milking their customers out of their money.........

 

[JosephAW]

I can't wait for the day when they remove the screen and you can only view your display on the EyePods.

 

[Simplifier]

And for the gazillionth time, people will complain and and scream at Apple, and invoke the end of Apple, while the company is going to sell so many iPhones that it will again break records and get so much cash it could buy an entire country.
How many years of examples do we need? If something can be removed, believe me, it will be removed. Whether it is your car’s driving wheel, the power button on your iPhone, the SIM card in your iPhone, the volume buttons on your iPhone, damn, even the iPhone one day will get replaced with something better. This is the certainty of evolution since the dawn of Man. Whether it is about an organism transforming into a walking homo sapiens or the iPhone, this is exactly the same thing to me.
But sure, complain. The same types of people complained about Apple removing the floppy disk or the CD-Rom as well. Remember when Steve Jobs wrote his piece on Flash? So many people were angry. Look at today, no one uses Flash anymore. That’s just the perfect example.

And if we talk about the real thing for a second, I have the iPhone X since last year and I never ever charge it with a cable. Most people charge it at night and have a full day of battery, it will even more be the case with the bigger iPhones this year. So once again, it will work for 99% of the people 99% of the time. And it’s a great opportunity for Apple to sell a ******** of AirPower. A couple for home, one for the office, etc. Cannot wait to give some money to Apple - the best company on Earth.
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again apple finding new ways of milking their customers out of their money.........

This is outrageous. A company making money.

 

[Baldrake]

So all our brand new cars that still have wired CarPlay will be obsolete? They sure as hell better provide an adapter for that!

This.

 

[Simplifier]

Removing the headphone jack is still the dumbest move they’ve made recently.

Yeah, let’s bring back the Jack 3.5, the floppy disk and the CD-Rom on the Macs as well. Damn Apple! And let’s reinstate Flash as well!

People, Apple is known to push the boundaries. Haven’t you learned by now? As Steve Jobs used to say, people buy Apple products not only because of the things Apple add, but also for the things Apple decides not to add. Such as a Mac without a CD-Rom, such as a smartphone utilizing all the space inside for useful components when listening to music can be easily done wirelessly. I love my AirPods and would never go back to plugging headphones anymore.

 

[HVDynamo]

I honestly can’t wait for true wireless charging. It’s so tedious having to plug your phone in and out every day. I know there’s a charging mat but that isn’t really wireless when it still has to be plugged in with a wire and you can’t use your phone freely at the same time. I think we’re going to look back at wires as something ancient that we couldn’t believe we had to put up with in a few years time. It will be similar to using a wired modem for your computer. It’s still faster using wired, yes, but we can’t go back to that now with wireless internet being far more convenient and necessary in today’s world and we’ll think the same about wireless charging to the point where it’s something we don’t even think about anymore like WiFi.

You are going to be waiting a long time for the type of wireless charging you are thinking about. The inverse square law is a pretty hard physics limit, and there is no good way to get around it. The farther you get away from the source, the faster the intensity drops off. While it's technically possible, It's ridiculously inefficient to the point of absurdity.
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Yeah, let’s bring back the Jack 3.5, the floppy disk and the CD-Rom on the Macs as well. Damn Apple! And let’s reinstate Flash as well!

People, Apple is known to push the boundaries. Haven’t you learned by now? As Steve Jobs used to say, people buy Apple products not only because of the things Apple add, but also for the things Apple decides not to add. Such as a Mac without a CD-Rom, such as a smartphone utilizing all the space inside for useful components when listening to music can be easily done wirelessly. I love my AirPods and would never go back to plugging headphones anymore.

Floppy disc and CD drives out grew their data capacity, 3.5inch jack does not have that problem and is still by far an industry standard for audio.

 

[CmdrPuffin]

I'd still happily be using Floppy discs if they were measured in GBs. I am still using BD-XL discs that hold 100GB each. When it comes to technology function should precede form.

With regard to removing the charging port Apple is going to need a major improvement in battery life first. My phone makes it about halfway through the day. Without a battery case my iPhone X would be useless after lunch.

 

[Hater]

SE still has a headphone jack, it's not Apples fault y'all need to buy handbag sized phones.

 

[jdsingle]

I'm still upset about them removing the 3.5mm audio jack.

Quit making things difficult for the consumer!

What specifically makes you upset with this (genuinely curious)? The adapter that came with my iPhone X hasn't caused an issue so far with wired headphones. Granted, I'm primarily using bluetooth headphones unless I need to make a call using Apple's old wired headphones.

 

[Nicksd84]

Hopefully Jony Ive focuses on the iPhone he can help design today instead of the one 10 years in the future.

 

[Brandonjr36]

If they do this. They better offer real wireless charging as in plugging in a small box in the outlet and charging 15-20 feet away. Now that would be pretty cool. Have one for a car charger as well.

 

[LDN]

The concern here is not charging. The dangerous implication that this raises is that if an update bricks your iPhone, what do you do? will there be some kind of diagnostics port? Will Apple make the Smart Connector the new charging and data transfer contact on the bottom of the iPhone? There always needs to be a way for a user's computer to make physical contact with their smartphone should anything bad happen.

If Apple replaced the Lightning port with the Smart Connector dots and had it fulfilling charging and data transfer, that would be pretty slick.

 

[Feenician]

The concern here is not charging. The dangerous implication that this raises is that if an update bricks your iPhone, what do you do? will there be some kind of diagnostics port? Will Apple make the Smart Connector the new charging and data transfer contact on the bottom of the iPhone? There always needs to be a way for a user's computer to make physical contact with their smartphone should anything bad happen.

If Apple replaced the Lightning port with the Smart Connector dots and had it fulfilling charging and data transfer, that would be pretty slick.

I’m not really sure why people think there’s an absolute need to connect a device to another device to recover it. Modern Macs have recovery partition and internet recovery in the firmware if even that fails. Sure, it has a cost both financial and in physical volume but both reduce over time.

 

[TsMkLg068426]

Yeah whats the big deal Apple loves to slow your battery or drain it faster after many iOS updates so you can buy a new. Wireless charging is not even every home it has not trended well enough to get people to buy it and only few cars have wireless charger plus it sucks for people with older cars that came with older bluetooth and no Apple Play now you have to find a converter to connect to the AUX wire that goes into the jack and it is terrible because it keeps loosing connection.


Just because you can find a wireless headphone it doesn't mean you can connect wireless everywhere else especially in older cars and no one is dumb enough to buy a new car just for that reason.

 

[Baymowe335]

Would you say that Apple copied gestures and having no home button from Android? Interesting you say Android phones copied Apple, yet there were Android phones without a headphone jack before Apple did it. Isn't it interesting when you do your own research instead of spewing out lies?

No one, including Apple cares what no name Android phones do. Apple was removing the headphone jack regardless and because they did it, the industry followed. You don’t think that’s reality, fine with me.

 

[Lloydbm41]

Even if they get rid of an actual port, there will still be some way in which to connect a physical cable, if only to perform diagnostics. My guess is something like the Smart Connector, which seems not so much as a new technology Apple wanted to develop a peripheral market for, but rather a real world, proof of concept test for future implementation. Since the iPhone only supports USB 2.0 transfer speeds now, there's no reason to offer more than that level of connectivity when the primary method of charging and connecting is via wireless.

It also means people will need yet another adapter.

You seem to have forgotten about that NFC chip. No diagnostic ports needed, just need the software written to utilize NFC to give us diagnostic info.
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I'd still happily be using Floppy discs if they were measured in GBs. I am still using BD-XL discs that hold 100GB each. When it comes to technology function should precede form.

With regard to removing the charging port Apple is going to need a major improvement in battery life first. My phone makes it about halfway through the day. Without a battery case my iPhone X would be useless after lunch.

You WOULD NOT be using floppy discs even if they held 100GB each. The read/write speeds are way to slow for anything except WordPerfect docs. <- Since you love old tech, I gave you the word processor of choice from the early 80s.

 

[Regime2008]

No one, including Apple cares what no name Android phones do. Apple was removing the headphone jack regardless and because they did it, the industry followed. You don’t think that’s reality, fine with me.

It's sad that you choose to live in denial like that. Apple was not the first. Not really the first to anything for that matter, they are usually dead last place. But hey, I won't rain on your parade of being closed minded/wrong. Let me guess, Apple was the first to make notifications as well? Lol

 

[Lloydbm41]

What, you don't want a white pancake stuck to your dash or carseat so you can charge and drive at the same time?

You know there are different options available to wirelessly charge in your car? One is to buy a car with built in wireless charging (when you are ready to buy a new car, that is). Many cars have this feature now.

And there are plenty of wireless chargers that look just like normal phone mounts for cars, they just have a cord attached to them. You just have to route the cord out of the way, so it doesn't look like crap.
I have my Valentine One radar, wireless charging car mount and a camera mounted and all of my wires are hidden along the roof liner and the car door weather seal of my Chevy Volt. Everything looks clean.
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It's sad that you choose to live in denial like that. Apple was not the first. Not really the first to anything for that matter, they are usually dead last place. But hey, I won't rain on your parade of being closed minded/wrong. Let me guess, Apple was the first to make notifications as well? Lol

I'm no fan of people claiming Apple was the first in many instances, but they have instituted many things that became industry standards because they did it. Getting rid of the floppy drive, getting rid of the CD drive, using a mouse with a PC as a way to navigate a GUI, 3D touch, thin wedge shaped laptops, just to name a few.

 

[Regime2008]

I'm no fan of people claiming Apple was the first in many instances, but they have instituted many things that became industry standards because they did it. Getting rid of the floppy drive, getting rid of the CD drive, using a mouse with a PC as a way to navigate a GUI, 3D touch, thin wedge shaped laptops, just to name a few.

Do you, for even a split second, believe that we would still be using floppy discs if it weren't for Apple? Apple has always gotten rid of port, features, functionality over time, just look at the state of their hardware and software. But while removing ports, it's not like they have pioneered the next gen replacement for "x,y,z" port which they removed. Look at the headphone jack. It was only removed to sell their airpods.