iPhone 17 Air USB-C Port May Have This Unusual Design Quirk

HighwaySnowman said:
I think it's going to be the opposite.

The ONLY way this abomination will sell is if it turns out to be dirt cheap. Nobody actually wants the reduced battery or the extra-bendable thin phone. It won't sell as well as the mini.

There might be some initial sales, but once the JerryRigEverything video comes out, it's done.
Click to expand...
I want the thinnest, lightest device possible, and we’ll never get there if we have to worry about passing a bend test by JerryRigEverything 🥲 bring on the Apple version of the Mate XT!
 
rikki_t said:
USB-C is nice but flimsy in my experience, I always preferred the lightning connector, thinner, more secure and foolproof, they should have stuck with it, way easier to accommodate on a this design.
Click to expand...
Flimsy? I've got tons of USB-C stuff and I'd never call it flimsy. It's a beefy connector unless you're a troglodyte smashing stuff around
 
mattopotamus said:
What do you mean a lump? I exclusively charge my 15 pro wirelessly and battery health is currently 88% with 560 cycles.

Data transfer via a cable with your phone, that is very niche.

I think the most realistic real world issue it would create are people without wireless carplay.
Click to expand...

That’s good for you. But wireless charging will never be as efficient as a cable. It charges slower and generates more heat. It also requires a large puck on the back of your phone or for it to be on a table.

Then you have the problem with what do you do if you need to quickly top up your phone away from home, a universal cable is really handy for that.

Essentially there’s a number of downsides and no upsides. What would be the point?
 
theluggage said:
…a bit like, you know, USB-C… which Apple had a major hand in designing and promoting.

Apple have shared connector designs - such as MiniDisplayPort - in the past (as well as collaborating on USB and Thunderbolt). Nothing about making a proprietary Lightning 2 connector would have made sense, the only mystery is why they took so long to switch iDevices to USB-C (probably a mixture of milking the last drop out of MFi and briar-patching so the EU got the blame for you having to buy a new alarm clock phone stand).
Click to expand...
The MFi royalties conspiracy has been long debunked. The obvious reasons is that customers generally hate a connector change.
 
AlexESP said:
“Outdated” is a very relative term. It had lower data transfer speeds, but when very few customers care about this, other factors (i.e. how sturdy lightning is) are more important.
Click to expand...
Hard disagree. And a strange anecdotal hill to die on. Taken as a whole lighting was amazing for its place and time, years ahead of the competition. But that time has come and gone. And Apple helped with USB-C making it the heir apparent. People always complain about USB-C sturdiness but I've yet to see any meaningful data to back that up. It's got all of lightning's advantages with none of the drawbacks. But like Henry Ford said, if people were asked what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. Such is the nature of people yelling at clouds.
 
When all is said and done, more than any other iPhone in history, this will live or die on the pricing strategy.

Under Cook, 100% guaranteed Apple will botch that, but will go to great lengths to spin it as a hugely successful test-case (quite literally) for the incoming foldable due in 2027.
 
sleeptodream said:
Hmmm, if accurate they should’ve just made the whole bump bigger, this could end up rocking like crazy when set down without a case
Click to expand...
I think the reason they are going for wide bumps now may be to reduce the rocking.

Making the bump higher creates more problems with the phone getting caught on that edge, and being less comfortable in snug pockets. The rocking might be the lesser evil.
 
KPOM said:
Interesting. I wonder if these elements will make it to the broader iPhone lineup in the future.
Click to expand...
It depends on advances in battery technology. By 2030, batteries for cellphones may have enough capacity that a very thin battery pack could have over 5,000 mAh capacity, which means a future iPhone "Air" model could have at least the same battery life as the current iPhone 16 Plus.
 
Chungry said:
Hard disagree. And a strange anecdotal hill to die on. Taken as a whole lighting was amazing for its place and time, years ahead of the competition. But that time has come and gone. And Apple helped with USB-C making it the heir apparent. People always complain about USB-C sturdiness but I've yet to see any meaningful data to back that up. It's got all of lightning's advantages with none of the drawbacks. But like Henry Ford said, if people were asked what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses. Such is the nature of people yelling at clouds.
Click to expand...
Probably only Apple has some data. But without it, we can reason that Lightning is sturdier, based on how it’s built. Even without data, I know that a Mercedes G-class is sturdier than an Opel Corsa.

There are obvious downsides with USB-C: for example, it’s bigger than Lightning. And when you have a device desperately needing space and very few people use its connector for data transfer, it’s not clear that a bigger and faster connector is worth it.

I’m not sure about the analogy with Ford, because I’d say people in Macrumors are on the other side: they want chunkier devices with bigger batteries, faster connectors no matter the consequences, etc. And those ideas would probably not result in a great product.
 
tomtad said:
That’s good for you. But wireless charging will never be as efficient as a cable. It charges slower and generates more heat. It also requires a large puck on the back of your phone or for it to be on a table.

Then you have the problem with what do you do if you need to quickly top up your phone away from home, a universal cable is really handy for that.

Essentially there’s a number of downsides and no upsides. What would be the point?
Click to expand...

to create space inside the phone. That was the only point of my initial post based on this article.
 
TechWhisperer said:
Omg this is beyond insane. The USB-C port has shifted from its sacred central position. Save yourselves before it's too late, my beloved ones. The asymmetry is just the beginning of the end. I've seen what comes next, and it isn't pretty.
Click to expand...
This is unironically something Steve Jobs actually might have get hung up on.
 
AlexESP said:
“Outdated” is a very relative term. It had lower data transfer speeds, but when very few customers care about this, other factors (i.e. how sturdy lightning is) are more important.
Click to expand...
Other iDevices - like the iPad Pro and higher-end iPhones are being sold for content creation and/or as laptop alternatives. They need 4 lanes of data for connecting 4/5k displays, Thunderbolt/USB4 devices, and even USB 3 only has limited support via Lightning, and have higher power requirements. Macs have gone almost all USB-C (as have the Magic peripherals, although why they ever had Lightning is a mystery).

So although Lightning may be good enough for keeping an iPhone Air charged it makes more sense to adopt the same connector across the entire range.
 
Wanted797 said:
Apple caused usb c. They could have allowed licensing of lightning to other manufacturers or just let anyone use it many companies would have quickly jumped on board and it would have become standard.

But no. Apple help it as proprietary.
Click to expand...
My question is why are people other than the poster editing posts? I am confused by this. I have sent MR a message about it and got no reply. I mean either the post is acceptable to the MR LAW or it’s not. If it is it shouldn’t be touched. If it isn’t, it should be deleted not edited. I can’t get anyone to answer me back which is most frustrating.

Asking the poster, what did the other editor remove from your post?
 
theluggage said:
Other iDevices - like the iPad Pro and higher-end iPhones are being sold for content creation and/or as laptop alternatives. They need 4 lanes of data for connecting 4/5k displays, Thunderbolt/USB4 devices, and even USB 3 only has limited support via Lightning, and have higher power requirements. Macs have gone almost all USB-C (as have the Magic peripherals, although why they ever had Lightning is a mystery).

So although Lightning may be good enough for keeping an iPhone Air charged it makes more sense to adopt the same connector across the entire range.
Click to expand...
Yes, there are many professional use cases where you need high transfer speeds, and there are many many more users who will never make use of it (and would benefit from the space saved with a smaller connector). On bigger devices, maybe the upsides are clearly worth it. But on iPhones, where on top of that, many users have accessories that use lightning, it’s not clear at all.

Once you start considering the big picture, like the many different kind of users they have, side effects of changing things, etc., few things seem black or white.
 
AlexESP said:
(and would benefit from the space saved with a smaller connector)
Click to expand...
...unless they also have headphones, other mobile devices, power banks etc. which are all in the advanced stages of switching to USB-C charging...

Anyway, I'd be interested to see a comparison in the internal space occupied by a USB-C vs. a Lightning socket. As I said in another post, the Lightning "shaft" is smaller than the USB-C "shield" -but the Lightning socket has to have space for connectors above/below the shaft whereas with USB-C everything fits inside the "shield". Not saying that lightning is bigger but I doubt that there is very much in it... and the real thickness of the phone is determined by the size of the camera bump, anyway.
 
Veinticinco said:
When all is said and done, more than any other iPhone in history, this will live or die on the pricing strategy.

Under Cook, 100% guaranteed Apple will botch that, but will go to great lengths to spin it as a hugely successful test-case (quite literally) for the incoming foldable due in 2027.
Click to expand...

You mean like all of the other iPhones released under Cook that have been manufactured and sold to customers at the rate of 600,000 iPhones per day, every day of the year (on the average), helping to make Apple one of the most successful tech companies in the world?
 
Unami said:
What do you use it for? It's practical for documenting things in small spaces, but in general, the wide angle on iPhones looks like a..?
Click to expand...
I do a ton of projects around the house and it's nice to capture the whole room. As well as pretty frequent nature photos where I can't always back up. Plus of course the cat.
 
ItsASpider said:
No, nobody would have jumped on that bandwagon. No major player would have wanted to be part of an ecosystem that is fully in Apples control where Apple demands you to produce products to their specifications. Apple would probably not have wanted that in the first place either.

Not to mention that such a move would have put pressure on Apple to actually develop Lightning further which in its turn would probably have resulted in a connector that is much larger than the Lightning that we know so it could accommodate the massive power and data requirements that USB-C supports today. People seem to be a bit quick to forget that Lightning was an outdated spec even when USB-C launched, never mind now nearly 10 years later.
Click to expand...
Lightning had the potential to be developed and Apple could have allowed others to do so.

Lighting is a superior port (imo) given it’s a single solid piece and smaller than usb c with no central thin connections.
 
mattopotamus said:
I'm honestly surprised they didn't just go full wireless charging being tight on space.
Click to expand...
If they didn't it's probably because wired charging is faster and smaller in terms of the charger, and many would prefer the option to charge both ways. Having it there is the right tradeoff, they made the display on the larger side (6.6") to compensate in terms of battery capacity/internal space.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Back
Top