Kuo: AirPods, MagSafe Battery Pack, and Other Apple Accessories Also to Switch to USB-C in Future

xpxp2002 said:
The Lightning cables are already manufactured and people own them thanks to all the iPhones and AirPods already out in the wild.

Switching to USB-C will simply create a cable replacement super cycle where a bunch of completely functional Lightning cables end up in landfills.
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Lightning cables will continue to be manufactured for eventual relocation in land fills until Apple stops producing more products that still need them. The sooner Apple abandons lightning in their products the sooner they won’t be produced and the sooner landfills wont need to accommodate them.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Brace yourself though: that kind of post should get you about 20 posts like "I'm still using my first lightning cable from 5 years ago and it is perfect in every way. Been through the wash 10 or 12 times, run over 5 times, my kids play tug of war or jump rope with it frequently, I just used it to tow my buddy's broken-down-truck, my dog has eaten it at least 10 times, etc." You know it's coming. ;)
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Relentless Power said:
Perhaps you should try taking better care of your cables then. Because after owning over 14+ iOS devices, I’ve never had a ‘frayed’ cable, ever.

Unless of course, you want to blame Apple because you let your cat chew on the cables, maybe that’s what you meant by ‘fray’. :D
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That took 2 hours and 30 minutes.

You must put absolutely no strain on your Apple cables.

I’ve owned countless iPhones, iPads, and iPods over the years. Apple cables are without a doubt among the worst name brand Lightning cables you can buy. I don’t even use the ones that come with my devices because historically, they don’t last. Additional waste — thanks, Apple! I’ve never had a braided cable fray on me. I’ve seen so many frayed Apple Lightning, MagSafe, and 30-pin cables, but for some reason it’s never occurred with my braided Anker cables or other similar brands.

Similarly, my mom — by all means more of an average user than I am — seemed to always have issues with Apple cables. Once I replaced hers with braided cables, I haven’t had to worry about it.

But yeah, all of those frayed cables over the last 15+ years are probably because of the cat I got 5 months ago.
 
And mrat93, I hate to tell you but WOW! That cat really gets around. Do a search for Apple Lightning Fray and you'll find that cat is a global traveler... and perhaps super-powered, because only super-speed might make it possible to chew fray that many cables. ;)

Any of these people who have never suffered a frayed lightning cable are lucky people who must treat them very carefully... or forgetful people who have replaced them regularly and just don't remember that they have to keep doing so. More than a few times, I've took tape and even duct tape to some in a pinch. There's web "how to" pages focused on the topic of how to minimize Apple Lightning cable fray using springs and other additives. Bad kitty... bad, bad kitty.
 
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fooobar said:
well for others it's the opposite - we have lightning cables pretty much everywhere, multiples in each location actually (bedrooms, living room, kitchen, cars, travel bags, etc.) since most of our devices all still use them (iphones, ipads, airpods, power banks, etc.) and comparatively have very few devices that use USB-C.

i acknowledge that eventually we'll all be forced to switch over as devices evolve and we eventually upgrade, but for now to most people who don't actually need to do a lot of data transfer, USB-C doesn't really offer any real world advantage over lightning (the cable's just used for charging anyway).

it just means that our existing lightning cables will become useless & we'll have to spend extra money buying a whole bunch of extra USB-C cables to place everywhere instead...
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Which is how you got to lightning cables from 30 pin cables, right?
 
All of this - when it eventually happens will have been like 7 years too late.

It should have happened alongside the 2016 Touch Bar MacBooks that went full USB-C/Thunderbolt
 
xpxp2002 said:
This is not true. Only the newest iPad Air and Pros have USB-C. My iPad Pro is Lightning, as are the base model and nearly all older Airs and Pros.

One cable to charge five devices isn't going to work well. I'll end up having to go out and buy new cables. And at the end of the day, that's just me. The reality is that while everyone can make excuses for why we should ignore all the waste that such a change will generate, despite Apple's environmentally-conscious PR, most people will simply throw away cables that they view as obsolete and no longer usable.

Most people who own an Apple product only have an iPhone. No iPad or MacBook. For them, the Lightning cable is just as useful and convenient as anything with USB-C. In fact, it's actually better because of the cable design -- it doesn't have a fragile internal connector tongue like USB-C that can easily break off.

Even if those Lightning cables have a limited life left in them with legacy devices, most people will throw them in the trash as soon as they get their first USB-C iPhone. Apple's change will have a significant real world impact on the artificial creation of e-waste that will largely be driven by consumer perception that their old cables have no value anymore, and they will end up in landfills. I guarantee it.
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Move on. Lightning is dead and has been for years already. All current and recent Apple products from the last 5 years require 5 Gbit level data throughput transfer data that they are designed to process. 0.5 Gbit lightning throughput is like keeping a parallel printer port on PCs for 20 years.
 
mnsportsgeek said:
AirPods Pro 2 better be usb-c then. I’m gonna stop buying lightning stuff if this is really the direction of the company.
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I hope you’re right but I don’t see them releasing headphones this year that use a charge not compatible with this year’s iPhone.

Perhaps next year they’ll announce AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C, similarly to how they introduced AirPods Pro with MagSafe.
 
zorinlynx said:
Unfortunately we're going to be stuck with USB-A for a long time. I went on a flight not long ago on an American Airlines 737 with its new "refreshed" interior.

Right in front of me on the back of the seat in front of me was a USB-A connector for charging my phone. If I only had the USB-C to lightning cable that comes with newer iPhones, I wouldn't have been able to use it to keep my phone charged. Luckily I always travel with a couple USB-A to lightning cables.

Most phone charging stations in the wild use USB-A still. I rarely ever see a USB-C port in my travels. New cars only started coming with USB-C fairly recently, and they're usually "charge only" ports that don't let you use things like CarPlay.

USB-A will be with us for a long time still, it's still being put into new stuff, and we're going to have to keep an USB-A charging cable with us for the forseeable future if we want maximum convenience.

EDIT: Looks like there's solutions out there for people who don't want to carry extra cables. But still, you're not going to be able to avoid USB-A for a long time!

www.amazon.com

USB C to USB Adapter (4 Pack),USB-C Female to USB Male, Type C to USB A Converter Compatible with Apple MagSafe, iPhone 11 12 13 14 15 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy Note,Google Pixel etc, Grey

USB C Female to USB Male Adapter 4 Pack ,SOCW Type C to USB A Converter Compatible with MagSafe Charger,Laptops, Power Banks, Chargers, for iPad Air 4, iPhone 11/12 Pro Max, Samsung Galaxy S20 etc, grey
www.amazon.com
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I agree. I no longer buy products with any interface other than USB type C. All of my cable purchases are future proofed Thunderbolt 4 that is designed to encompasses all USB function.
 
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mnsportsgeek said:
AirPods Pro 2 better be usb-c then. I’m gonna stop buying lightning stuff if this is really the direction of the company.
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MagSafe is adequate. No port required. One more What we do need is an AirPod case that can connect via Bluetooth with the lid closed. What were Apple Engineers thinking when they designed a case that is invisible to FindMy function when closed, whether the AirPods are in it or not? Is the location of the case not even more important with the AiPods are inside charging? SMH.
 
mrat93 said:
I hope you’re right but I don’t see them releasing headphones this year that use a charge not compatible with this year’s iPhone.

Perhaps next year they’ll announce AirPods Pro 2 with USB-C, similarly to how they introduced AirPods Pro with MagSafe.
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Ya that seems more realistic. But also would make me rethink buying the pro 2s at launch.
 
Relentless Power said:
Perhaps you should try taking better care of your cables then. Because after owning over 14+ iOS devices, I’ve never had a ‘frayed’ cable, ever.

Unless of course, you want to blame Apple because you let your cat chew on the cables, maybe that’s what you meant by ‘fray’. :D
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They have a fray-proof Lightning cable now, using nylon, but they don’t include with iPhones for some reason.

But regardless there have been Apple cables that literally fray from normal use too. Well fraying or yellowing or both. My Magsafe 2 power adapters are a testament to this. Just normal use, or being very careful and not twisting the cable, and my current one is yellowed up and close to fraying. That’s my second Magsafe 2, my first got frayed from twisting the cable around the built in cable management flip-up holders, HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW USING THE INCLUDED FEATURE WOULD RUIN THE ADAPTER, lol. Thank goodness it’s finally a detachable cable in Magsafe 3 although you can use type-C anyway.
 
mnsportsgeek said:
AirPods Pro 2 better be usb-c then. I’m gonna stop buying lightning stuff if this is really the direction of the company.
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I got bad news for you, Apple doesn’t switch accessories like the Airpods before the main product line switches, the iPhone. So it’s the ‘23 iPhone allegedly switching to USB-C and the AirPods Pro 2 are alleged to be later this year. So the 2 will be Lightning and Magsafe based like the current one.
 
LOL at all the "Apple bad because Lightning cables are just going to be tossed comments"; I guess they can go with all the Mini USB and Micro USB cables. I know its trendy to criticize Apple for using Lightning, but there have been several USB plug types which have fallen out of favor in the time that Apple has stuck with their single port type. So everyone settle down and drop the self-righteous act.
 
What I find incongruous from a lot of posters today is the virtue signaling about Lightning cable waste when I absolutely don’t recall anyone saying a peep about the supposed waste generated from the introduction of the 2018 iPad Pros and later, the iPad Air 4 and 5.

There’s been a continuous drumbeat of people who want a USB-C iPhone and complaining that Apple hasn’t done it already and now the environmentalists are now claiming we’re going to have a cable apocalypse and it’s all Apple’s fault. Funny, shouldn’t we have had that when the iPad went USB-C. Everyone going over the edge already needs to get a grip. Buy the iPhone 14 and plan your transition or wait for the iPhone 15 and spend a bit more time planning your transition. All this bleating and chest thumping has more to do with people having to cough up money for cables than it does the environment. For a bunch of tech enthusiasts, there sure are a lot of people whining about change.
 
darngooddesign said:
In fact having one C and one A port on a two port laptop would would have been inconvenient to the majority of users;
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Who proposed a 2 port laptop with one C and one A port? Having so few ports so that you couldn't connect a charger, display and (say) an external drive without some sort of multi-port hub was ridiculous, and even the 4-port 2016 MacBook Pro compared badly with the Magsafe + 2xTB2 + 2xUSB3 + HDMI 2015 model (and we were just getting to the stage where conference room projectors had HDMI ).

Sometimes people got so carried away with all the wonderful things that Thunderbolt 3 could do with 5k displays and super-fast SSD RAID arrays, that they forgot about the poor masses who just wanted to connect a common combination of mundane stuff without needing a hub.

Even the pre-USB C MacBook Air managed to pack 2 USB ports, plus a Thunderbolt 1/2 Port plus a Magsafe port - so you could charge, use an external display and external hard drive at the same time and still have a free port when someone handed you a USB stick. The obvious USB-C "update" - at least in 2016 when nobody had any USB-C peripherals - would have been to replace the TB2 port with a TB3 port and keep the old ports. We'd all have needed new display dongles (but at least we were already used to that, and have to face the fact that you can't include DisplayPort, HDMI and VGA on a slim laptop - although, other than VGA for projectors, I mainly used a passive MiniDP to full DP cable - cheaper and less complex than a USB-C to DP cable).

If we could have had 6+ USB C/TB3 ports, that would have been an improvement - but the problem is that even "full featured" USB-C - let alone Thunderbolt - uses more CPU resources than any single-use port, and - at least with Intel - mobile processors couldn't support that many, so "all USB-C" translated to "very few ports".

We're getting there with the Studio - 4xTB3, 2xUSB-C/3.2, 2xUSB A plus a HDMI for a second/third display, separate ethernet and built-in PSU - and since it's a desktop, plugging in adapters to get the USB-A ports that (even now) most things still use isn't a big deal. Finally a Mac with adequate I/O without paying $6k for a Mac Pro...
 
ApplesAreSweet&Sour said:
I'm sure Apple is getting more serious about prototyping USB-C for iPhones. Okay. But none of this is confirmed and there's no need to speculate further without more substantial leaks.
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The top-end iPhones are getting more and more powerful, and being promoted more as "prosumer" video/still cameras than phones/music players so it's getting to the point where it would actually be an advantage to have USB 4 or Thunderbolt for file transfer. So, EU or no, it's getting to the point where USB-C on the iPhone would be a good thing... it's already come to the iPad Pro... and Apple have now designed on-chip USB4 controllers for the M1, which could be included on a future A-series chip.
 
HobeSoundDarryl said:
Apple chose USBc over Lightning for Macs long ago. Most iPads are already USBc. Apple obviously LIKES USBc and you rarely see the defenders calling Apple out for 'stupidly' using USBc in the other Apple products where Apple has already gone with it. Apparently, USBc is perfectly fine where it is already used... and makes no sense where Apple clings to Lightning... UNTIL Apple makes the change... and then it will magically make perfect sense there too. Same with 30-pin to lightning... same with firewire to 30-pin. This will be no different.
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You obviously forgot all the people complaining about the changes for years after Apple made the change in a lot of these cases, especially on sites like MR. It wasn't until after the ecosystem matured for USBC/Lightning before people came around to it, just in time for the next change.
 
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