Comment by MBCook
3 days ago
So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing.
Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
3 days ago
So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing.
Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here
Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users.
The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.
I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector.
Do you have a citation for what you're saying?
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https://www.wsj.com/video/apple-executive-on-adoption-of-usb...
Apple argues that the law was dumb environmentally due to many people having Lightning-cables that wouldn't work in the future, so they obviously can't have intended to do the same changeover at the same time as the EU forced them to
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Chinese cable manufacturers don't need contract guarantees to compete for the lucrative iPhone user market...
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There are many things they do which Apple argues benefits their users, but end up benefitting themselves in suspiciously manipulative ways. I'm not shocked they entered a 10 year contractual agreement, and that just so happened to allow them to make a lot of profit by using a proprietary cable.
They lock down individual parts to device serial numbers, this helps prevent fraudulent repair services with poor quality parts, it also ensures Apple is always involved in the repair process and they can make a lot of money on that.
They use a proprietary RAM design, this significantly improves hardware speeds but also stops you replacing or upgrading the modules yourself. They also just happen to charge a serious premium on RAM capacity, and don't sell the modules on their own. Even if a third-party did manufacture the modules and sell them separately, they are also locked down to serial numbers.
This is Apple's bread and butter, enforcing consumer hostile practices and spinning it into a benefit, usually filled with half-truths to muddy the waters. In all of these situations, it's possible to do better by the consumer but why would they? At the end of the day they're here to make money, as much as they possibly can, and they're uncontested in their own vender hardware, doesn't mean we shouldn't call them out for their awful practices every time they appear.
The iphone could have had both usbc and lightning, so if they cared about that they would have done it.
Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that.
I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.
That's not right. They were an early investor in ARM Ltd., but they in no way "helped develop ARM". That was all Acorn. ARM Ltd was created because Apple thought ARM was a good fit for the Newton, but didn't want to be beholden to a competitor, which Acorn was.
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Who is stopping someone from competing against ASML?
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That did turn a huge number of chargers and accessories into e-waste though...
probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device
yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C
edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
Chargers of that era typically had a USB A port and can still be used with an A to C cable
LIghtning due to its DRM chips (and the delicateness of Apple’s “aesthetics-first” first-party cables) was not a long-lived cable. We threw away probably 2-3 per year during the whole era. Throwing away the last couple before their natural death, when I finally eradicated Lightning from our home, was no great loss.
Lightning is just the snowcap on a mountain of Mini- and Micro-USB.
With the benefit of reduced waste in the future, though
You know you can get a lightning-to-C adapter for very little, right? Here you go, under $2 each: https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-Charging-Transfer-C... (probably under $1 each if you have the patience to look for them in other sites)
And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter
Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.
To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
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Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.
They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
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EU kinda failed with it once before, they pushed for phone vendors to get to common standard https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"
It's conceivably politically incorrect to use this reference, but Apple was begging the EU not to throw them into that briar patch.
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People spent a whole decade complaining about the iPod dock -> Lightning change.
I'd wait to blame the EU also.
> but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede
There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.
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Absolutely. It is excessively obvious and I don’t understand how not much more of a common take that is.
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Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17.
Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable. Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass.
It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified.
Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c
Wow , you need lot of homework to do. You missed the whole timeline of events, backlash with apple and usbc and just looking at headlines.
Or either misrepresenting the facts because you are a fan boy of a trillion dollar company. Please dont if its latter.
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Apple was forced to upstream the standard because the writing was on the wall so may as well preempt it.
It’d also a benefit for Apple, since once upstreamed it shares the maintenance burden across all participants.
It is also worth noting that Android wasn’t using the standard as well. If they had, this would have been day 0 interoperability for Android phones. Instead, it is a single phone model released a couple months after iOS 26.
I feel like your take is what an Apple PR person might say in order to downplay Apple's defeat.
Hah, right? Everyone understands that Apple wouldn't have done anything by themselves if it wasn't for the DMA.
The whole selling point of Apple was that as long as you're inside the ecosystem, you'll get the smoothest experience. Well, now the law says that devices, apps and products from third parties should be able to be used on an iPhone as seamlessly as Apple's own products, of course they wouldn't have given that up willingly.
And that's how regulations work. The very companies targeted by regulations often design and push for them. By doing so they gain a competitive advantage, price out smaller rivals, and move closer to becoming a monopoly. Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor, talks about this in his book Competitive Strategy.
The moat gets mighty large when the government regulators start making it bigger. That's one of the advantages that the Mag 7 has now - it's not just the scale but it's also the compliance burden for new entrants.
Well they forced a standard that anybody can use to support wirelessly sending files to nearby devices. That's a huge chain and taking a few bricks out of the garden wall.
I literally do not care about the wanky culty Android this Apple that stuff. I just want to plug my phone into my Mac and have it be able to read it, regardless of what phone that is. When someone needs to send me a document, I don't want them to have to change how they send it based on what device I have. Regulation and enforcing common interoperability standards is good for consumers; I don't care whose implementation wins out, just that all my devices support it.
The headline is 100% correct.
It is literally correct. My point was I think it implies the EU had to force a totally belligerent Apple (which we’ve certainly seen) instead of Apple already working on this and EU perhaps speeding the timeline a little.
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The EU: Sacrificing constituents' privacy rights with one hand, while courageously fighting for the sacred right to AirDrop with the other.
If a law forced Apple to do good for everyone, not just a small group of people, isn't that a good thing? It wasn't exactly that AirDrop got legislated, but thanks to the DMA, AirDrop (and other things) are within scope and they now have to make things more seamless for everyone. Win-win no?
Don't worry, the United States is always eager to prove that you can neglect both consumer rights and user privacy at the same time.
This wasn't a "meanwhile, the U.S. is good" post. Let's hope this massive AirDrop "win" eases the sting of the rights that the EU is eroding.
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The national governments are to blame, not the EU.