My experience with electronic gadgets and doodads extends back years and of i-products I've had a touch and now an iphone.
I've never seen a crappier charging port design than the iphone. Nothing seems bad about it at first, just the annoyance of having a stupid proprietary connector that isn't compatible with anything else I already own. Pisses me off but is no different from any of my other cell phones. They all had the pointy kind of connector that's not much different from a headphone jack so were incredibly durable. I had a blackberry at a previous job and was very happy with the mini-usb connector. Never had one of those fail. And as far as plugs go I've only ever seen one headphone jack fail between all the computers and media players I've used.
But these damn mac cables! Ugh. It looks like what happens is these things are too wide and provide too much leverage for failure. I've got a couple of spare cables I bought from Amazon so that I can have a cord at work, one for the car, one for the gizmo shelf at home, one at the computer for the rare occasions I plug in there. I'll get these ridiculous compatibility errors where cables will stop working. I don't know if it's just cheap chinese knockoffs or if there's bugs with Apple's compatibility checking routines. Knockoffs usually work with most other devices. A character that runs you $25 from the store can be had online for $4 and they work just as well. Your $19.99 printer cable is usually a big box store scam and planning ahead and buying online saves you bucks.
Right now I'm having intermittent charging problems between cheapie cables and the official mac cables. Twisting the phone this way and that will cause the connection to drop and the phone will chirp every time the status changes. I don't see any dirt or dust in there. I'm wondering if it got leveraged at some point and something may have bent slightly. I've never ever had any problem like this with mini-usb connections, they're rock solid. I hear the industry is supposed to be standardizing on micro-usb for all portable devices in the future. Hopefully this will also include Apple?
I've never seen a crappier charging port design than the iphone. Nothing seems bad about it at first, just the annoyance of having a stupid proprietary connector that isn't compatible with anything else I already own. Pisses me off but is no different from any of my other cell phones. They all had the pointy kind of connector that's not much different from a headphone jack so were incredibly durable. I had a blackberry at a previous job and was very happy with the mini-usb connector. Never had one of those fail. And as far as plugs go I've only ever seen one headphone jack fail between all the computers and media players I've used.
But these damn mac cables! Ugh. It looks like what happens is these things are too wide and provide too much leverage for failure. I've got a couple of spare cables I bought from Amazon so that I can have a cord at work, one for the car, one for the gizmo shelf at home, one at the computer for the rare occasions I plug in there. I'll get these ridiculous compatibility errors where cables will stop working. I don't know if it's just cheap chinese knockoffs or if there's bugs with Apple's compatibility checking routines. Knockoffs usually work with most other devices. A character that runs you $25 from the store can be had online for $4 and they work just as well. Your $19.99 printer cable is usually a big box store scam and planning ahead and buying online saves you bucks.
Right now I'm having intermittent charging problems between cheapie cables and the official mac cables. Twisting the phone this way and that will cause the connection to drop and the phone will chirp every time the status changes. I don't see any dirt or dust in there. I'm wondering if it got leveraged at some point and something may have bent slightly. I've never ever had any problem like this with mini-usb connections, they're rock solid. I hear the industry is supposed to be standardizing on micro-usb for all portable devices in the future. Hopefully this will also include Apple?
