Nah. The only thing usbc has over lightning is transfer rates and charging speed.
Transfer rates don’t matter because how often do you dump 128gb over the wire and 500Mbps isn’t good enough?
Charging speed kinda matters but not really because the charge controllers on the phones are throttling down the lightning chargers anyway.
Remember: the eu is forcing usbc, a port designed for general purpose use that has a bunch of delicate pins and a plastic tongue, to replace lightning, a much simpler port designed to go in pockets.
The phones all use heuristics to charge as slow as possible anyway in order to save the battery. A faster changing standard clearly isnt the solution.
Idk what you’re doing with your phone that 500Mbps isnt good enough. If it’s about system backups the first one takes fifteen minutes and everything afterwards is a diff.
I think 500mbps is a stretch tbh, even the spec’s 480 is still a stretch considering USB protocol overhead. If your device uses the much slower MTP then you’ve got that overhead on top of the USB protocol too.
That said, in real life this is not much more than 20MB/s. That’s more than adequate for internet, but this speed is 2005 laptop hard drive territory. Forget recording in 4k or 8k, because that footage is going to take a while to pull out - airdrop would probably be much faster than using the cable, which is embarassing IMO
Even if the lightning data transfer speed is “good enough”, you’re still paying big money for a premium device, where the manufacturer made a conscious decision to use tech from over two decades ago… when just adding two more lines to the SoC and switching the connector to something compatible is all it takes to benefit from the much greater transfer speeds now.
…actually meh I don’t really care lol, nobody is going to stop Apple from milking their customers regardless of how intuitive their software is.
Oh yeah. You’re not getting 480 out of that wire and airdrop is totally faster. 4k isn’t awful over airdrop though. Maybe I’m just glad it’s not ntsc real time capture like back in the day…
Ultimately I agree with you. It would have been good to add the other “side” to the receptacle and have plenty of lanes. You’d need some way to show that a wire is new lightning, but that’s small potatoes.
Ultimately though even with the bad speeds I think lightning is the better connector for a phone. Not many people are transferring video off their phone using a wire, most upload it directly. But everyone puts their phone in their pocket. I’ll take the connector you can easily and safely clean lint out of over the one that saves time transferring video any day.
A phone cable. Lightning is a better phone cable than usbc. I say that because it’s more durable and easier to clean. Thats way, way more important than charging or transfer speed when the port knocks around in a pocket or purse 420-7/369.
I have only once encountered that problem. I don’t usually charge stuff outside home/work/car.
If I did, I’d keep my own cable because even before the advent of malicious cables people often had messed up stuff that only worked half the time.
Think “hey can I borrow that guitar cable?” “Sure!” “What the hell, this things buzzing all over the place!” “Oh, you gotta loop it around the strap peg and it doesn’t work with angled jacks.”
The idea of proprietary hardware nowadays is interesting. It used to be, especially in industrial and commercial uses, that proprietary meant you had to have something that could only be bought from one place and wasn’t publicly documented. An interface for a rohm drive for example. Those weird one-off parts and dongles were expensive and not well understood, so they definitely fit the definition and spirit of being proprietary.
It’s a little disingenuous to me to call a cable you can buy at any gas station for five bucks “proprietary”. Especially when searching “lightning pinout” gets immediate results.
Is it technically proprietary? Maybe. Is it proprietary in practice? Not in the slightest.
Ease of cleaning is a terrible reason to order one over the other though. Just grab a sim tool to gently scrape out fuzz, and you’re back to better charging speeds and data transfer speeds, literally the reason USB C 3.0 is superior.
When lightning came out, the other choice was MicroUSB which is an objectively bad connector that can burn in hell. I hate MicroUSB with a fiery passion. And people were really upset that Apple ditched the 30 pin connector so I cant fault them for keeping lightning so long. Either way I really don’t care because the only thing it changes for me is the cable I keep at my bedside. My data transfers are all done wirelessly. I don’t know why people think this is such a big deal, it is (mostly) just a charging port. As long as it doesn’t break if you breathe on it wrong like MicroUSB I’m happy.
I still have useless 30 pin connector accessories floating around.
USB-C has higher transfer rates if the device supports USB 3 standard. Since it will have multiple serial connections as compared to a single in USB 2. Since lightning had only 4 pins it couldn’t go beyond USB 2.
Same is the matter along with USB-C PD chip. It has to support and negotiate faster charging with the charger. This can be and as far as I know Apple will be restricted to Apple certified crap.
a port designed for general purpose use that has a bunch of delicate pins and a plastic tongue, to replace lightning, a much simpler port designed to go in pockets.
This will ultimately make you unhappy.
Android phones have been using it I think for the last 8 years. We do have pockets and keep our phone without covering the port. I still have a cable bought 4 years back that still works across multiple phones.
Oh you don’t have to tell me that usb phones have been in pockets. i know.
I fix electronics and people bring in phones all the time. Even though I’m not a phone shop and don’t even have a bench set up for phones. I get way, way more usb phones in for ports than lightning ones.
Now it’s not just usbc (although nowadays it almost always is), but I keep a big ol bin of different usb ports to replace with. I have done four lightning ports in comparison.
If people are lucky they just didn’t have a small enough pin to clean out the crud from around the tongue. Some will have one of the pins on the tongue bent back and shorting something out and confusing the controller, they might be able to get by without it or it may work for a little while once it’s straightened back out but I know that one’s coming back soon. Most have damage to the tongue from cleaning too vigorously using a field expedient tool or the port component itself is ripped off the board due to how well the very strong annular connection between a usbc port and cable transfer torque.
I like usbc for a bunch of stuff, but phones ain’t it.
That’s true, but at least one a week for a few years now versus four ever? Nah. The ports too delicate for what users put it through.
Plus I get more apple stuff in general than the marketshare numbers would dictate. It gets repaired and resold longer. Massive amounts of usbc devices are throwaway and gimmies from institutions and carriers and are just disposed of when they break.
Some of that effect is the expense of apple stuff, some of it is the emotional attachment people build with a computer after they’ve used it for ten years, some of it is just plum retained value. People aren’t gonna chuck a laptop they can resell for $400 when it needs a $100 repair.
Nah. The only thing usbc has over lightning is transfer rates and charging speed.
Transfer rates don’t matter because how often do you dump 128gb over the wire and 500Mbps isn’t good enough?
Charging speed kinda matters but not really because the charge controllers on the phones are throttling down the lightning chargers anyway.
Remember: the eu is forcing usbc, a port designed for general purpose use that has a bunch of delicate pins and a plastic tongue, to replace lightning, a much simpler port designed to go in pockets.
This will ultimately make you unhappy.
Yes who would care about transfer rates and charging speeds on a phone cable as compared to umm…
The phones all use heuristics to charge as slow as possible anyway in order to save the battery. A faster changing standard clearly isnt the solution.
Idk what you’re doing with your phone that 500Mbps isnt good enough. If it’s about system backups the first one takes fifteen minutes and everything afterwards is a diff.
I think 500mbps is a stretch tbh, even the spec’s 480 is still a stretch considering USB protocol overhead. If your device uses the much slower MTP then you’ve got that overhead on top of the USB protocol too.
That said, in real life this is not much more than 20MB/s. That’s more than adequate for internet, but this speed is 2005 laptop hard drive territory. Forget recording in 4k or 8k, because that footage is going to take a while to pull out - airdrop would probably be much faster than using the cable, which is embarassing IMO
Even if the lightning data transfer speed is “good enough”, you’re still paying big money for a premium device, where the manufacturer made a conscious decision to use tech from over two decades ago… when just adding two more lines to the SoC and switching the connector to something compatible is all it takes to benefit from the much greater transfer speeds now.
…actually meh I don’t really care lol, nobody is going to stop Apple from milking their customers regardless of how intuitive their software is.
Oh yeah. You’re not getting 480 out of that wire and airdrop is totally faster. 4k isn’t awful over airdrop though. Maybe I’m just glad it’s not ntsc real time capture like back in the day…
Ultimately I agree with you. It would have been good to add the other “side” to the receptacle and have plenty of lanes. You’d need some way to show that a wire is new lightning, but that’s small potatoes.
Ultimately though even with the bad speeds I think lightning is the better connector for a phone. Not many people are transferring video off their phone using a wire, most upload it directly. But everyone puts their phone in their pocket. I’ll take the connector you can easily and safely clean lint out of over the one that saves time transferring video any day.
Begone Apple shill!
A phone cable. Lightning is a better phone cable than usbc. I say that because it’s more durable and easier to clean. Thats way, way more important than charging or transfer speed when the port knocks around in a pocket or purse 420-7/369.
Lightning is a worse cable because it is proprietary.
How many times have you encountered the problem of wanting to charge your phone at a friends place, and they don’t have your device specific cable?
In the last decade, I only encountered that with Apple devices.
I have only once encountered that problem. I don’t usually charge stuff outside home/work/car.
If I did, I’d keep my own cable because even before the advent of malicious cables people often had messed up stuff that only worked half the time.
Think “hey can I borrow that guitar cable?” “Sure!” “What the hell, this things buzzing all over the place!” “Oh, you gotta loop it around the strap peg and it doesn’t work with angled jacks.”
The idea of proprietary hardware nowadays is interesting. It used to be, especially in industrial and commercial uses, that proprietary meant you had to have something that could only be bought from one place and wasn’t publicly documented. An interface for a rohm drive for example. Those weird one-off parts and dongles were expensive and not well understood, so they definitely fit the definition and spirit of being proprietary.
It’s a little disingenuous to me to call a cable you can buy at any gas station for five bucks “proprietary”. Especially when searching “lightning pinout” gets immediate results.
Is it technically proprietary? Maybe. Is it proprietary in practice? Not in the slightest.
But aPpLe bAd!!!
Ease of cleaning is a terrible reason to order one over the other though. Just grab a sim tool to gently scrape out fuzz, and you’re back to better charging speeds and data transfer speeds, literally the reason USB C 3.0 is superior.
When lightning came out, the other choice was MicroUSB which is an objectively bad connector that can burn in hell. I hate MicroUSB with a fiery passion. And people were really upset that Apple ditched the 30 pin connector so I cant fault them for keeping lightning so long. Either way I really don’t care because the only thing it changes for me is the cable I keep at my bedside. My data transfers are all done wirelessly. I don’t know why people think this is such a big deal, it is (mostly) just a charging port. As long as it doesn’t break if you breathe on it wrong like MicroUSB I’m happy.
I still have useless 30 pin connector accessories floating around.
USB-C has higher transfer rates if the device supports USB 3 standard. Since it will have multiple serial connections as compared to a single in USB 2. Since lightning had only 4 pins it couldn’t go beyond USB 2.
Same is the matter along with USB-C PD chip. It has to support and negotiate faster charging with the charger. This can be and as far as I know Apple will be restricted to Apple certified crap.
Android phones have been using it I think for the last 8 years. We do have pockets and keep our phone without covering the port. I still have a cable bought 4 years back that still works across multiple phones.
Oh you don’t have to tell me that usb phones have been in pockets. i know.
I fix electronics and people bring in phones all the time. Even though I’m not a phone shop and don’t even have a bench set up for phones. I get way, way more usb phones in for ports than lightning ones.
Now it’s not just usbc (although nowadays it almost always is), but I keep a big ol bin of different usb ports to replace with. I have done four lightning ports in comparison.
If people are lucky they just didn’t have a small enough pin to clean out the crud from around the tongue. Some will have one of the pins on the tongue bent back and shorting something out and confusing the controller, they might be able to get by without it or it may work for a little while once it’s straightened back out but I know that one’s coming back soon. Most have damage to the tongue from cleaning too vigorously using a field expedient tool or the port component itself is ripped off the board due to how well the very strong annular connection between a usbc port and cable transfer torque.
I like usbc for a bunch of stuff, but phones ain’t it.
Well there are more USB-C devices than lightning.
That’s true, but at least one a week for a few years now versus four ever? Nah. The ports too delicate for what users put it through.
Plus I get more apple stuff in general than the marketshare numbers would dictate. It gets repaired and resold longer. Massive amounts of usbc devices are throwaway and gimmies from institutions and carriers and are just disposed of when they break.
Some of that effect is the expense of apple stuff, some of it is the emotional attachment people build with a computer after they’ve used it for ten years, some of it is just plum retained value. People aren’t gonna chuck a laptop they can resell for $400 when it needs a $100 repair.