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192 comments
  • While the lightning cable was ahead of its time when it came out, mostly because the USB consortium couldn't get its shit together, nowadays it's woefully inferior.

    Having said that, Apple has still managed to fuck their customers over by making so that only their overpriced "high speed" USB-C cables can work at anything better than USB 2.0 standard.

    I doubt that 3rd parties won't try to circumvent Apple's BS, but goes to show even the EU couldn't make Apple drop the act entirely.

    Edit: And that's not even talking about the wildly expensive lightning to USB-C converter they're selling to anybody desperate enough to hold onto their lightning cables

    • I don’t really know much about hardware and never bothered looking at transfer speeds and such, but why is lightning inferior? I like it because it’s reversible and the prong doesn’t seem like it could snap or get damaged that easily.

      Not that matters much because in the three years I’ve had the phone I’ve plugged it in like five times.

      • USB-C has for years now supported higher wattage power delivery, and higher data transfer speeds than lightning.

        I can't speak to your experience, but from mine, the build of quality of Apple's own lightning cables was terrible. I owned two IPod Touch's over the course of about 6 years, and I basically went through one cable a year because they'd just disintegrate towards the ends of the cable or internally decapitate themselves. Didn't even need to break them, they'd break themselves.

        Whereas in the 6+ years I've used phones with USB-C, only two of them have broken. One was because the cable got snagged under a chair and I pulled the USB-C end off not realising it was stuck, and the other one was my Mum breaking the USB-A end shoving it into a plug the wrong way. Both things that had nothing to do with the build quality of the cables. I still have every other one of my USB-C cables.

      • For one, USB-C can (if implemented) transfer data at 40Gbps vs lightning's 0.5Gbps. USB-C also charges a lot faster.

        USB-C is also reversable like lightning, and the connectors are internal.

        Android phones used to use USB-B micro, which wasn't reversable, but a long time go exeryone switched to USB-C which feels like at was invented to be a better version of lightning and has had many advances while being backwards compatible with early USB-C hardware.

  • Even better when your mental idea of an iphone charger is a conector hanging from a wire with the insulation peeled.

  • Also I can actually borrow peoples cables now, seems everyone with a cable has an iphone

192 comments