USB C is a huge downgrade from lightning. The lightning connector is far more robust. The little inner connector board on USB C is so fragile. I’ll never understand why people wanted this so badly.
The accurate comparison here isn’t between random low-budget USB-C implementations and Lightning on iPhones, but between USB-C and Lightning both on iPhones, and as far as I can tell, it’s holding up nicely.
I have multiple ones. They accumulate dust easily and get damaged much more often. You won’t see that if 99% of the time is in clean environment. As of today I have 3 iPhones that won’t charge on the wire. Those are physical damages so it’s not like anything covers it (and Apple Care is not available in Poland). Same happens with the cables. I’m replacing USB-C display cable (that’s lightning I suppose) every year now because they get loose and start to disconnect if you sneeze in the vicinity.
I despise USB-C with all my heart. Amount of cable trash has tripled over the years.
I do, I rarely use USB-C on Apple devices (well outside of Mac). Wireless is great and I have nice looking night clock and moving files/other stuff over airdrop works good enough for me not plugging anything in. Recently I had to charge over the phone which required removal of pocket lint beforehand.
I'm a big fan of this change, however, I think to a black mirror episode [0] where essentially little robot dogs could interface with everything they came into contact with because every connection was the same, it may be trivial to have multiple connections for a weapon like this but the take away I had from this is that 'variety' may be better than a single standardized solution. Partly because it is more expensive to plan for multiple types of inputs and making the cost of war go up will make it more difficult which I think inherently is the idea behind some of the larger cybersecurity companies, a hack can only work once then everyone has defenses for it after that single successful attack, this makes it more expensive to successfully stage attacks. Huge digression from this convo... but I think back to this constantly.
Many defensive are a trade off between the convenience of non attackers, and the trouble created for attackers.
Given the sheer number of devices we interact with in a single day, USB-C as a standard is worth the trade off for an increase in our threat surface area.
1000 Attackers can carry around N extra charging wires anyway.
10^7 users having to keep say, 3 extra charging wires on average? That’s a huge increase in costs and resources.
1) Surely the world conquering robo-army could get some adapters.
2) To the extend to which this makes anything more difficult, it is just that it makes everything a tiny bit less convenient. This includes the world-conquering robo-army, but also everything else we do. It is a general argument against capacity, which can’t be right, right?
There's simply more people with the opposite problem, especially in markets where Apple is less prevalent, which is most of them around the world. When there's more than one type of cable, plenty of people are going to be inconvenienced when one is chosen as the cable to rule them all, but in the end everyone wins, it's just annoying to get there.
> plenty of people are going to be inconvenienced when one is chosen as the cable to rule them all, but in the end everyone wins
That's not everyone wins. The people that actually bought these devices now have cables that don't work and need to replace with a lower quality product, and the people who were already using something else are continuing to not need cables for these devices. The majority breaks even, a significant minority loses.
Simply not choosing one cable to rule them all lets everyone win. There is no compelling reason for one size to fit all.
Again, that's not a win for anybody. No one winds up in a better position than where they started, there is no payback in exchange for the temporary drawback, which also isn't temporary if the final standard is inferior.
If some people like hip hop but more people like country, it's not a win for everybody to eliminate the hip hop radio stations so we can all listen to a single country station.
Not at all. A common railway gauge is necessary for different parts of the rail network to be joined together. If one section of the network has a different gauge, it is cut off and can not be joined without being completely replaced, leaving you with two less capable rail networks. Everyone does benefit from a more capable rail network.
Further, rail gauge is not a consumer choice. If there were two rail gauges and your local rail station happened to have a different gauge than your destination, you'd be SOL. A different rail gauge may provide benefits for people with specific needs, but you don't get to take advantage of those benefits except by blind luck.
There is no such benefit from standardizing cable connectors. If someone charges their phone with the same style cable as you, you gain nothing. If someone uses a different cable, you lose nothing. There is no reason for anyone not to use their preferred cable which is optimal for their use case.
Everyone, but the environment wins. Once I upgrade my phone and Airpods, I will have to throw out my pack of perfectly working lightning cables.
I'm sure there are more than a few people that would end up throwing out their perfectly functional accessories, only for the convenience of carrying less cables.
All of mine are USB C and now I only carry around one. All of the lightning cords and micro USB cables are in a drawer somewhere with the DVI, component cables, etc.
It’s a huge upgrade on the basis of allowing me to remove lightning cables from my life
On a specsheet basis it also charges faster and has a higher data transmission rate.
Lightning cables are not more robust. They are known to commonly short across the power pins, often turning the cable into an only-works-on-one-side defect. I replaced at least one cable every year due to this.
Lightning was basically what happened when Apple got tired of waiting for the standards committee to converge on what USB-C would be, so they did their own.
And... yeah, it turned out better than the standard. Their engineers have really good taste.
And then the rest of the world got tired of Apple not proposing this supposedly superior piece of engineering as a new standard... because of licensing shenanigans.
