← Back to context

Comment by delfinom

11 days ago

I would assume the vast majority of people aren't doing anything serious with their USB ports on a phone....

31 comments

delfinom

Reply
xp84  11 days ago

It did take 8 hours to do a migration of data from my wife's 256GB iPhone 14 (lightning) to her iPhone 15 Pro this year, so that's at least one "serious" thing. I am so glad to be rid of that cursed Lightning port. Now I just have to come up with a good excuse to replace the younger child's tablet, despite it working fine. It is so frustrating to have to maintain special charging cables just for certain devices especially when you know it was a deliberate and cynical choice by the vendor. Thank goodness for the EU forcing this matter.

  • ggreer  11 days ago

    Taking eight hours to migrate the data is almost certainly a software issue. Assuming the phone is completely full, transferring 256GB over USB 2.0 (480Mbit/sec, or 60MB/sec) should take about an hour and 15 minutes.

    • userbinator  11 days ago

      USB 2.0 mass storage bulkonly protocol maxes out around 40MB/s due to protocol overhead and hardware limitations, and in practice it's closer to ~35MB/s.

      https://superuser.com/questions/317217/whats-the-maximum-spe...

      ...which still gives ~2h as the amount of time taken to transfer 256GB. My suspicion for the slowdown (to around 8MB/s?) is the flash controller is doing read retries and applying ECC to compensate for retention failures.

    • xp84  8 days ago

      It probably is a software issue (though I usually assume USB-2 is more likely to be about half its raw rated speed), and if the pokey USB-2 speeds aren't a bottleneck that's truly ghastly.

      But it was an interesting data point to me. It's utterly ridiculous how long Apple devices take to do migrations now.

  • sgarland  11 days ago

    IMO, Lightning was a better physical connector. But a near-universal standard is better.

    • brookst  11 days ago

      Lightning puts the main failure modes device-side. Apple’s learnings, which they contributed to USBIF as part of the USB-C effort, were to put the mechanical failure points in the cable, not the device.

      3 replies →

  • brookst  11 days ago

    The EU did not force the matter. They trotted out in front of the parade and pretended to lead it.

    Apple switched a year before required, and not coincidentally, ten years after promising that Lightning would be the connector “for the next decade” so as to reduce fears from those who were angry about being “forced” to replace their 30-pin peripherals.

    I don’t know why tech enthusiasts tend toward conspiratorial thinking, but certainly if Apple had obsoleted Lightning after only 8 years, many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding class action lawsuits over such a greedy deceit.

    • dangus  11 days ago

      I think you need a pretty good amount of willful naivety to think that Apple didn’t make the switch with such coincidental timing to EU law changes purely out of the love of their customers.

      Let’s not forget the very same year they stopped including the charging brick they started including USB-C to lightning cables in the box, so that their supposedly environmentally friendly practice forced their users to buy a new brick unless they saved previous cables. Why didn’t they switch to USB-C back then? To make users do another transition a few short years later?

      They’re aren’t exactly a company with a track record of maintaining standards for the convenience and backward compatibility for their customers. This idea that they kept lightning around to maintain legacy standards doesn’t really track with the rest of their behavior.

      They have a 20+ year old reputation for abruptly dropping and replacing ports.

      5 replies →

    • xp84  8 days ago

      > those who were angry about being “forced” to replace their 30-pin peripherals

      > many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding

      As you may have guessed I'm pretty critical of Apple (despite giving them a ton of money) but I'd classify the above critics as idiots (and given the media loves a story like that, a lot of that outrage is entirely made up for clicks). To the extent Apple cares what anyone thinks (and I doubt they do), they surely know that any decision they make will be attacked by this type of knee-jerk silliness.

      Media: Apple keeping their proprietary Lightning connector for MFi revenue reasons and because they don't want to be compatible or make it easier to switch to Android.

      Also Media: Apple forcing everyone to switch from Lightning to USB to force them to buy all new expensive accessories! Greed!

    • scarface_74  10 days ago

      Apple would have eventually moved the iPhone to USB C. It had already started moving the iPads to USB years before the mandate. The EU hastened it.

makeitdouble  11 days ago

IMHO it is a learned habit that will change as limitations are lifted.

Plugging a SD card reader to one's phone instead of pulling out the laptop to push the images to the cloud for instance. You do it once, and will be immediately convince of the advantages.

scarface_74  11 days ago

I have a portable external monitor with two USB C ports. It can get power and video from one USB port.

I can plug it up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the same standard USB cord. With a phone, it can only power the display up to 50% brightness by itself. If I plug power into the second USB C port, it will show the display up to 100% and charge my phone.

https://imgur.com/a/6g1QOkT

Having USB C also means I can use a standard USB C to HDMI cord for TVs and use the same cord for my computer. Not to mention all of the other standard USB protocols like audio, mass storage, Ethernet, etc. that just work.

  • ThatPlayer  11 days ago

    It's also funny that the Lightning to HDMI adapters had to add hardware to decode a compressed video stream from the Lightning port.

    It's basically a wired AirPlay adapter. That's why they cost so much.

    • dwaite  11 days ago

      Lightning was meant to be a software-defined serial data interface, I suspect because of the confusing breaking mess that was the 30 pin adapter over its lifetime. The digital logic to work with hardware was pushed outside the phone into the cable.