It is not. People are complaining for the sake of complaining.
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iPhone Air Features 3D-Printed Titanium USB-C Port With Three Benefits
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It's impressive that Apple can implement additive manufacturing at the scale of iPhone production! I wonder if we will see that tech move up to larger parts. A 3D printed unibody iPhone would be amazing.
What if I really enjoy a light phone? does that make me a lemming?
Have you tried air dropping a large video file to a Mac from an iPhone? good luck!
Part of it is just base expectations. Like the vast majority of what I do is fine with 50Mbps Internet but if my cable company's base is 500Mbps then that is what I want. 10Gbps USB3 is kind of a baseline for USB these days.
Then some people do like to transfer large files (e.g .videos) to and from their phones directly and of course faster is better for that.
Also at some point there is a obsolete issue with it -- I wouldn't be surprised if Apple tried to leave USB2 behind if it didn't mean dropping support for a phone not even in stores yet. For example, do Macs even support USB v1.1 devices anymore? Given that USB3 has been available for 15 years now and Apple has a propensity to retire things far younger than that, it's bordering on bizarro to keep shipping anything not a keyboard/mouse as USB2-only.
I will assume that Apple has done the required research and likely found that the only people that actually care about transferring large files via this method, would buy the Pro phones. Most people just use it for charging and wouldn't even know what a USB version number meant.
Doesn't matter, bud. For $1,000, you should expect the device to come with technology that isn't quarter of a century old.
Exactly. As long as I don't have to dig out a Lightning cable like I do for my keyboard/mouse and ATV remotes, I'm good. I use it to charge, and even then, I mostly charge wirelessly.
People who don’t own iPhones need reason to hang around and complain about them, mostly.
That really is astonishing. Imagine the amount of 3D printing setups they need to produce millions of the same thing. 😳
We’re apparently lemmings for having preferences….
I think the iPhone 15 pro let you record to external storage directly.
There's also this interesting MagSafe attachment I found on Amazon.
Hagibis Magnetic USB C Hub with Magsafe for iPhone 16 15 Pro Max, 7 in 1 Type-C Docking Station 4K@60Hz HDMI SD3.0 TF3.0 Card Solt 100W PD 10Gbps USB-C AUX for MacBook Pro Air, iPad Pro (TC100)
Hagibis Magnetic USB C Hub with Magsafe for iPhone 16 15 Pro Max, 7 in 1 Type-C Docking Station 4K@60Hz HDMI SD3.0 TF3.0 Card Solt 100W PD 10Gbps USB-C AUX for MacBook Pro Air, iPad Pro
www.amazon.sg
At this point, I feel that there really isn't any justification for keeping usb-c at 2.0 transfer speeds, if the spec allows for faster speeds.
Concerning Macs, I have recently used my brand new MacBook Air to recover 25+year old files using a Zip 😱 Drive found on eBay and a USB A to C adapter... Hardware obsolescence was not an issue, but I cannot open my old MS Word files for software reasons.
So I will not worry for iPhone USB obsolescence!..
It's just something, anything, that one can be unhappy about regarding Apple. A tradition here.
Or they could go thinner with a thinner port… if the EU didn’t have a regulation requiring USB-C for charging if there is a port used for charging.
What I’m puzzled by is, why they're using 3D printing instead of subtractive manufacturing (i.e. a CNC)
Does steel respond well to CNC? If not, it makes intuitive sense to me that working titanium could at least rule that out.
The part is likely very small which makes this feasible. A 3D printed body would be too time consuming at the moment.
Yes, a lousy light liking lemming! alliteratively
How large is large? I just did a test with a 2.2 GB video file. It took 110 seconds to Air Drop from my iPhone 16 Pro to my M1 Pro MacBook Pro. That's about 164 Mbps, which is right in the range of real world USB 2.0 speeds. If I needed to do transfers like that regularly I'd figure out a different approach or not buy the iPhone Air.
The vast majority of people will never do a transfer from their iPhone Air to a computer using a cable. If you want me to make up a statistic, it's likely <10% of all iPhone users do a file transfer via cable to a computer regularly. Further, people buying the Air are not getting it primarily for the camera. The multiple cameras of the Pro would be better for most people making money from iPhone cameras. In that case, those users will benefit from the faster USB speeds if they transfer via cables.
None of this is defending Apple including USB 2.0 in the Air. I do understand it from a business perspective though; it makes sense for Apple to not include a higher-cost component when most people will not utilize it.
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Use case, my understanding, would be for video production. I currently do not use this type of feature but learning more about it as a program I use, Riverside, allows for I believe a second camera now) and that is my understanding on why someone would want or need a faster USB connection. Or someone transferring video etc. between devices.
Apple announces Final Cut Camera 2.0
Apple announces Final Cut Camera 2.0, introducing game-changing support for ProRes RAW and genlock on the all-new iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max.
www.apple.com
Genlock support lets multiple iPhone 17 Pro devices record in perfect sync with each other and with professional cameras. The feature eliminates the need to manually align footage frame-by-frame during editing.
I highly doubt a large majority of users would need faster USB speeds but wanted to chime in. Maybe someone else can chime in with their take on it.
Why? You act like it's the most expensive phone available. It isn't. You can't just throw the "$1,000" out there like it means something. It needs context. The context is that the most expensive phone in the lineup will cost you over $2,000.
fun little story — footage for Lord of the Rings was shuttled from New Zealand to Hollywood on iPods back in ~2000.
At the time, they were the cheapest reliable hard drives that money could buy, and Firewire (still faster than the USB-2 protocol that non-Pro iPhones use today) was the favorite standard for filmmakers.
iPhones have all kinds of uses. I think it’s silly to use USB 3 as a differentiator for the Pro line, but I’m not a Cupertino billionaire either.