Comment by grey-area
1 day ago
Having a standard plug is great, I hope we stick with it for decades and gradually the situation will improve as everyone gets used to the standard.
USB-C gets rid of all the stupid previous decisions on the physical connectors (orientation required but not obvious, fragile clips, too large, too small), the physical side of things is now set and hopefully all devices, chargers and outlets will now converge on usb-c.
Yes getting the right cable can make a difference but the situation is so much better than before, partly because phone manufacturers were forced by the EU to adopt one connector early one. I’m so glad Apple’s proprietary connector is gone.
> I’m so glad Apple’s proprietary connector is gone.
Apple made Lightning when the rest of the world was still mucking about with Micro-USB, which I would argue is just about the worst connector ever in common use. The only type of cable where I routinely kept a half dozen on hand because they failed so damn often.
I do like USB-C, but despite being superior (physically) on paper, it's not as robust as Lightning, definitely more finicky. But it has more capability, which is important.
What I've read is that the Micro-USB plug is intentionally designed to fail before the connector inside the device is damaged.
I have a compulsion for fixing things, so I've seen a lot of gadgets where a connector has been broken away from a circuit board due to repetitive stress on a plug. The most common have been audio plugs -- headphone jacks in cellphones, and some connectors in musical instrument gear. I'd much prefer to replace a $5 cable than an expensive phone or gadget.
But of course it's arguable that they made it too delicate.
Now that I'm on my soap box... I've also seen a lot of damaged cables where the breakage is in the wire just as it exits one of the plugs. And a common cause is the habit of coiling your cables neatly by wrapping them as tightly as possible. Since I mentioned musical gear, I'm a working musician, and I cringe when I see how people -- even engineers -- treat cables. I always advise people to watch one or two of the ubiquitous videos where some burly roadie shows the proper way of coiling and handling a cable. I'm a bassist, and I have cables that have lasted 20+ years.
> the Micro-USB plug is intentionally designed to fail before the connector inside the device is damaged.
I've had two devices where the MicroUSB socket has broken off the PCB. Not a huge amount considering I've probably had tens of devices with MicroUSB power over the years but a truly inconvenient amount given the impossibility of a home fix (for most people.)
Now I use those magnetic-plug cables and just leave the MicroUSB ends in whatever I might need to charge to avoid the physical stress.
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> Micro-USB, which I would argue is just about the worst connector ever in common use
False! Mini-USB is even worse.
I've found the opposite, Lightning cables routinely failed for me and I haven't had a USB-C cable fail yet, and I've been using them for 7+ years.
Not sure if it's the connector or the build quality, but want to throw in the opposite experience.
The cables fail from bad design.
The connectors are great.
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I just had to buy more type-C cables because all of mine are broken - always at the cable entering the connector, and I don't coil them tightly - but I've never used Lightning.
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How do people find Lightning cables robust? Every single one I got from Apple failed around the one year mark. So much so that I finally started buying cheap knockoffs that only lasted 6 months but cost a tenth of official ones. To compare, I haven't seen a single Micro-USB or USB-C cable fail on me whether expensive or cheap. Am I simply uniquely unlucky in the matters of Lightning cables?
> How do people find Lightning cables robust?
Had every Apple device that used Lightning and consequently have had a veritable smorgasbord of cables from official to Poundland to weird keyring ones; never had a single one fail.
Then again, I've not had a MicroUSB or USB-C cable fail on me either (without obvious physical damage like the one I half-melted by injudicious aiming of a blowtorch.)
My Apple Lightning cables weren't great either. They typically either started coming apart at the stress relief sleeve or the contacts would somehow corrode (other cables in the same container were fine).
I settled on buying packs of 3rd party braided cables for myself and parents so we could switch them out more easily.
With MagSafe, I rarely use a cable at all anymore!
> How do people find Lightning cables robust? Every single one I got from Apple failed
My third party cables are lasting 3-5 years. Absolutely would have preferred lightning cables, but it is what it is.
That said, Apples lightning cables were/are indeed quite low quality.
A few years ago, I bought a bunch of magnetic cables (with both Lightning and USB-C connectors - the cables are the same; only the connectors differ). I haven’t had any issues so far.
USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail. Actually all the USB connectors do eventually, because they all rely on a thin piece of sheet metal not bending when lateral force is applied. And, reversibility notwithstanding, they are still hard to fumble into place compared to (say) RJ45, or 3.5mm TRRS.
I have no love for Apple and their proprietary nonsense, but even lightning is a strictly better connector than USB-C - easier to insert, less fragile, better wearing. Still too many wires though.
I wish we'd used something like TRRRS, and stuck to 4 wires. Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.
TRRS might work for power, but it sucks for signal integrity - ergo no high-speed for you. And 4 wires is nowhere enough. You need two for each differential pair. No, half-duplex is absolutely not okay, it's the worst design decision in pre-SS USB.
> USB-C is very far from a perfect connector. The female side still has a fragile plastic tongue that can break. They also reliably wear out with use, both the cables and the socket. We've all seen them fail.
Strange comment. My USB C cables have only ever failed around the strain relief after lengthy use, as with any cable that gets handled a lot. I've got a few where I can feel the resistance gradually lessening when plugging and unplugging, but nothing has failed. As someone who wants to keep devices for a while the greatest thing about the USB C power standard sounds a little like faint praise, but: pretty much all my laptops relying on USB C for power will allow me to plug power into a different USB C port if the one I habitually use wears out.
Lightning was more failure prone, not just wearing out the goofy plugs but with failures on the device side. Micro-USB was a nightmare.
I also haven't had any USB-C ports fail, so +1 to your anecdata.
Some laptops are picky about what port you use to charge them, unfortunately - I believe my laptop has only one that can charge it fast enough to keep up with full GPU use - the others are around 20W iirc.
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Tangeant but then it means that framework's expansion card design for their laptop is a great idea: When the expansion cards plug into the mainboard they are already on a rail that prevents lateral stress, plus generally don't un/plug them often and you let the cheap replaceable expansion card takes on the wear.
I was also worried about the plastic tongue, but I have never managed to break one. In contrast, I have managed to irreperably damage the exposed metal contacts on multiple Lightning cables. If you'd asked me which should be more durable, I would have predicted Lightning, but my experience has been the exact opposite and beyond any doubt.
> USB-C is very far from a perfect connector.
There is no perfect connector. But a common, standardized connector across applications and manufacturers, which is available now, and has most of the useful features is the next best thing.
Audio 6.5 mm is as close as humanity got to a perfect connector. Unfortunately downsizing it to 3.5 mm removes the robustness of the female as it tends to eventually break
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> Very robust, any orientation, easy to fumble in blind.
Meh.
Anyone who has used audio devices with TRS will tell you how fragile both the female and male connections are.
Seriously. Who hasn’t wiggled a headphone connector and heard the static? And you want to run 40Gbps over that?!
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Lightning remains a better physical connection. So many USB-C connections I have are flimsy as hell.
I really have never had any issues with USB-C, lightning on the other hand was the complete opposite. Fascinating we have had the exact opposite experiences
I love the Lightning connector, and think it feels better than USB-C. My Intel MPB has terrible USB-C ports where the cables just fall out all the time.
But to be fair I've also had many issues with Lightning. A few shorted out and became unusable and burnt on one side. And those were 100% original bought in the Apple store, as were the 5W chargers and iPhone this happened with.
Knockoffs were generally terrible and might stop working. A "genuine" cable bought from big retailer turned out to be a knockoff once after a software update, resulting in annoying popups from Apple. And some knockoffs were so bad they didn't stay in.
Even certified Mfi ones from Belkin somehow felt different, like the tolerances were slightly off. Those worked though.
Overall, I think it's had a good run and was underrated as a connector physically, but on the whole I like USB-C and it's more open ecosystem more.
I'm mostly concerned about USB-C repeating what I consider the mistake they had with micro-USB: having a thin post/tab inside the socket of the phone. It puts the most fragile part of the interface on the most expensive side (the phone). It would make so much more sense to put that breakable inner tab on the cable side, so you only need to replace the cable. Lightning doesn't have that inner tab on either side, so I find it much more durable.
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Hmm. I don't see how. I'm poor so the quality of cables I can afford or buy is much worse than the average tech worker — I'm limited to either the cable that comes with e.g. my phone, or some 1.5m cables I bought from Amazon four years ago, and I've never had a flimsy or dodgy USB-C connection, even though those cables were put through hard work while I was homeless (and honestly I'm really, really surprised — they should be breaking by now).
Now, HDMI, on the other hand... yeesh
I disagree, lightning is more fragile as it has a single point of contact which can bend, they also become unusable if the exposed contacts get damaged or corroded.
Apart from that though it was proprietary, which is awful for lots of reasons; that’s the main reason I’m happy to see it gone.
Can't say why, but in my personal experience USBC is far less likely to stop working due to lint in the socket, which is fixable but annoying.
Lightning works great. It's a wonderful connector. Of all the Lightning-equipped devices I've ever owned (1), I've only ever had one single issue with it that required replacing a cable.
50% failure is an admirable and lofty bar that all electrical connectors should strive to meet.
Lightning is so awesome and universal that Apple has never even bothered fitting it to a pedestrian device like a computer, and has reserved it for only their most very-exclusive, high-tech devices (like the portable telephones and mice that were once available at astutely prestigious retail locations such as Wal-Mart).
Seriously, this Lightning connector is like the best Kool Aid ever. It's a shame that they stopped making it; it could have been everywhere, if only it had more time in a truly free market.
12 glorious years was clearly not enough time. It deserved so much more.
For that matter, every device with a Lightning connector except for a limited set of iPad Pro models in a limited set of situations, was USB 2.0, and even those unusual situations were 5 Gb/s USB 3.2 Gen 1. Power seems to have topped out around 18 W. The specs are not comparable with modern USB C, and it isn't clear that the connector itself would have been adaptable to comparable specs without significant changes.
Except for how either Apple or the pinout forced it to be (excluding very rare situations) stuck at 480MB/s. USB-C can hit 20GB/s. Lightning also tops out at lower wattages.
And by the time you revise the pinout, you effectively have a different connector. Lightning was nice-ish to plug in, but the wear-component was on the expensive device, not the cheap cable, and pairing it with the shit data transfer rate makes it a terrible connector
USB-C is much better than micro or mini, but still lacks the robustness of A. I would far rather have something a few mm bigger but tough.
Anything bigger is too big for smaller devices like phones.
Standard plug is great but government need to mandate labeling.
I'm stuck putting wire labels on every USB c cable I own. I can't tell the difference between a 3A and 5A cable otherwise, same for usb2.0 only cables vs 3.1 vs 3.2 4x,whatever the fuck.
The mandatory labeling should express:
* in Watts; optional voltage / current --- Gbit/sec '1/2' as rounding for 480mbit, permissible to use Engineering notation and power of 10 (rather than 2) values, must specify bit or byte base size unit.
I wouldn't be against better labeling, but I've found that I don't have to worry about it too much, day to day.
USB-C has allowed me to grab one decent two-port charging brick, two solid 6ft cables, and charge just about everything I own just by keeping those in my backpack. If I think I'll need to move any data fast, etc., I just throw my one good USB4 cable in my bag, too.
I will admit, though, that I've had some crappy situations at work where it turned out my flaky monitor setup was due to the stupid work-provided docks coming with cables that only supported 10Gbps. Better labeling would've solved those ones.
Hah same exact setup one brick two ports and it charges everything even my laptop! I've been eyeing some of the ones with built in batteries, but I get a lot of mileage of one brick in the bag.
The steam deck forced me to finally pay attention to the usb-c ecosystem and I can only imagine how some non tech people might get with mysteriously bad or slow charging.
I find it crazy that Apple went back to magsafe in the m4 (maybe earlier but that's the machine I have at work). But at least you can still charge over usb-c.
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Charging is the place it matters less.
You can just throw away the low-spec cables BTW.
This is the answer. I just bin the cables that come with devices and use my own spec compliant good cables. Thankfully the inclusion of a useless 5cm usb c to a cable with every device is coming to an end.
Yeah, every cable should have a 3 digit number of something with a unique capacity lookup.
If you're not fussed about amps, one digit is plenty. A-C cables have 3 possible speeds, and C-C cables have 5 possible speeds. And two of those are shared for 6 total, I think. You can keep all 8 separate if that helps remind you that only C-C cables can do monitors and thunderbolt.
There are some weird active cables but the vast majority of USB cables you'd buy today just need a speed rating and a note of whether they're 60 or 240 watts.