Comment by raw_anon_1111
3 days ago
> Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple
I have one of every Apple device category except the HomePod. But this is a horrible take. I can now use my same USB C cables everywhere.
But more importantly, I can use standard USB C peripherals from network adapters USB C external monitors, standard USB C to HDMI cords, plug a USB C storage device in etc
No, I get there are a lot of people like you, but you did have the choice of just using android didn't you? Governments are not ways to enforce your personal preference or force it on others. Apple felt their lightning tech was better, isn't having better tech and an environment where different ideas can be explored better? EU is already anti-innovation, you don't succeed with startups easily there, it's precisely because of this sort of close minded unimaginative thinking.
I don't care if apple required manually splicing wires to charge your phones (safely), how is it the government's right to force them to not do that? The whole point of having a free society is small things like this. I keep posting long posts on HN, so let me cut it short and say that lots of freedoms can be taken away in the name of convenience to others. Companies should be punished for monopolistic practices, but they shouldn't be punished for imagining alternative ways of doing things and succeeding with that. I've had android phones where the USB connector on the phone end broke or degraded, you can hopefully see my perspective as well? How can we have a free society like this if we can't even resolve and tolerate very small differences of opinion like this?
The lightning tech wasn’t better, it could only do USB 2 speeds - yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads.
You’ve had cheap Android phones if you had that problem. Have you heard reports of that being a problem with iPhones?
As far as compatibility, I carry around an external USB C powered external monitor for my laptop. It gets power and video from one cord on a computer.
I can take that same monitor and that same USB C cord and plug it up to my iPhone.
This is me sitting at a Delta lounge watching either Breaking Bad or Better Caul Saul with my phone connected to my second monitor
https://imgur.com/a/SC6WDri
The iPhone by itself can only power it to 50% brightness. But there you see if I plug in a battery to the second USB C port, it can power the monitor at full brightness and charge my phone.
USB C is better in every way.
> yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Those are two separate things.
These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.
In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.
There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.
So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.
Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.
With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.
USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.
USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.