My new iPhone with USB C charging is such an improvement!
Thank goodness for the European Union. If it weren't for them, we'd all be stuck with these flimsy Apple charging cables forever.
My new iPhone with USB C charging is such an improvement!
Thank goodness for the European Union. If it weren't for them, we'd all be stuck with these flimsy Apple charging cables forever.
Even if Lightning was possibly a nicer or smaller connector; nothing beats a true industry standard. Makes the entire “what chargers and cables to bring to connect my stuff” question so much easier.
Sadly, that's far from truth...
"back in the day", you had an ericsson charger that fit in an ericsson phone and charget that ericsson phone well... and you had a nokia charger for you nokia that charged your nokia. They physically looked different, they wouldn't fit into any other device, and when you needed a charger, you'd take the one that fit the charging hole and it would charge.
Now, you have a bunch of usb C bricks, some just 5V usb, some USB PD, some QC(2, 3).... then you have a bunch of usb C cables, some with ID chips, some without, some able to carry 15 watts, some 100 watts, and then you have devices, some that can do QC, some that can do smart PD, some with just some resistors, some without even those.
Everything fits in every hole, every charger can take any cable and any device can take the other end of the cable.... but will this particular combo charge your laptop? The cable fits.. will it charge? What about those cheap earbuds that just want 5 volts? The USB-A to usb-C cable that came with them works, but the USB-C to USB-C that you bought after, doesn't. How about that smart LiPo charger, it's USB-C, but it needs at least 9 volts to charge, and not every power brick gives out that voltage. What about charging speed? Will it do fast charge? Your laptop charging light is on, but the battery percentage is going down... why? What about a powerbank, does it charge your laptop? How does it know who does the charging, and who is getting charged?
I mean sure, if you know your standards, you'll know what devices need PD and which ones use QC, you'll read the specs on the power bricks, you know how many watts your laptop needs, how to switch the current directions, which devices can't do proper handshakes, and need usbA->C cables, etc, and you'll get yourself a baggie of a few power bricks and cables for different stuff, but i had to label the cables for my mom, because while everything physically fits, many combinations won't actually charge your device. 10 years ago, this wasn't a problem, since her laptop charger didn't fit her wireless earphones, now it fits and it doesn't charge them.
In practice, this complexity means you at least have a chance. Most phones and almost all low-power devices will accept power from most chargers and cables. Probably not at a maximum level, but if you're stuck somewhere you can get by.
Power-hungry laptops are trickier, but even so... I've gone a week or more trickle charging a laptop from whatever travel charger I happened to have on hand, using it for a few hours, then putting it in standby and charging it up again until finally the mfg-blessed replacement fast charger arrived. The alternative (and one I was faced with more than once in the bad old days) was "no laptop".
Worst experience I've had to date has been a Norco jump box that will charge via one high-power charger and one cable, a car charger it came with, and ... Via careful back feeding from a benchtop power supply.
I have successfully had am M1 MacBook open and in active use (albeit not with very heavy workload, mostly text editor and web), while plugged into a Nintendo Switch 1 charger (only thing I had handy at that moment), and was watching the battery percentage slowly increasing over time. So even laptops can sometimes charge slowly while in use with a rather underpowered type C charger (Albeit still slightly better than a cheapo 5V 3A Type-C phone charger).
I've charged a Mac with the Switch cable, and a Switch with the Mac brick. Nowadays I charge everything with the same brick from a dell laptop from 2018.
Is it the most efficient? Probably not. Is it hurting the batteries of my devices? I guess?? I haven't noticed any issues with any device and that's 8 years now. Perhaps I've been lucky.
That's for charging. Data can be trickier, that's true, but often devices that use USB-C for serious stuff come with their own. Chargers from aliexpress-grade stuff I just discard to the drawer of the 1M-cables from where nothing will ever come out.
You may be right, and I've had to live some of that myself with docking stations, thunderbolt, and such.
But those moments are the exceptions. In my everyday life, when I need to charge _anything_, except maybe for the laptop itself, I just look for a charger with USB-C and it works. It maybe faster or slower depending on everything you just wrote, but it works.
On a side-note, when I take the charger of my laptop, it can charge absolutely everything.
So yes, that's a true and honest improvement.
Yep, we gained nothing from moving laptops and other high power devices into USB, instead of finishing the standardization of the barrel connector. Laptops chargers were already almost all compatible, and there is no reason to mix them with the low power devices.
honestly, the lightning CONNECTOR was far better, but man, I really appreciate the standardization. We have one device on the house left using lightning (my wife's iPhone 13 mini) and .. well, I just wish they'd release a new mini, that's all.
> I just wish they'd release a new mini
you and a lot of other people.
that's the only reason I have lightning in the house, actually.
There were non-apple lightning cables already.
And I have to say, the lightning connector itself is better than the usb-c connect in my opinion. I get that having the pins on the male* plug is a theoretical advantage in durability but that has not been my experience with usb-c connector durability on either end.
EDIT: usb-c has pins on the male plug. Which is what I meant. So female -> male.
> the lightning connector itself is better than the usb-c connect in my opinion. I get that having the pins on the male* plug is a theoretical advantage in durability but that has not been my experience with usb-c connector durability on either end.
I always end up picking a lot of dust out of my usb-c ports on my phones; or otherwise the port wears out and disconnects before charging completes. (Right after my wife entered the hospital in labor, I needed to scrounge around for something to clean out my phone's port because the "go" bag only had a wired charger and my phone wouldn't charge on it.)
It's why I went to a wireless charger for daily use.
---
I'm real curious why lightning never became the standard. Was Apple trying to keep it proprietary? Was there a half-hearted attempt to open it up or otherwise convince the Android ecosystem to use it?
> I'm real curious why lightning never became the standard.
Because it is bad. In any connection there are springs that keep the tension, which will eventually wear out. They can either be on the cheap replaceable cable, or in the receptacle that is hardwired into your expensive device.
This is why, in part, USB Mini was replaced by USB Micro. ( https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/18552/why-wa... )
> Why Micro types offer better durability? Accomplished by moving leaf-spring from the PCB receptacle to plug, the most-stressed part is now on the cable side of the connection. Inexpensive cable bears most wear instead of the µUSB device.
Definitely had an iPhone where the port was worn out and getting it to connect was difficult.
One reason is that Lightning couldn't do the faster speeds or extra modes like USB-C. There were USB3 and display adapters but they were sort of hacks. USB-C was used for MacBooks and iPad Pros. USB-C allows passive adapters to USB2 and USB3.
> I always end up picking a lot of dust out of my usb-c ports on my phones
Lightning has the same issue sadly
The advantage of Lightning here is there is a totally open port, so picking lint out of the port is substantially easier. With Type C you have to work around the 'tab' and it requires much much smaller tools.
For everyone one with issues with lint either in a USB or Lightning port I really recommend an inexpensive can of compressed air.
I have not used lightning but I have found USB C to be much more fragile than USB A, although better than mini and micro. I would really rather have had evey thing be a few mm bigger and stick with A.
A USB-C successor (USB-D?) that's USB-A sized but with the added pins, reversibility, and bidirectionality of USB-C would be neat. But USB-C is “good enough” as a one-standard-to-rule-them-all that I don't think it'd be worth it unless there was a massive benefit (faster data transfer? beefier power lines? optical data lines?).
That's fascinating; I've only had positive experience with USB-C cables and terrible with Lightning. What kind of cables do you commonly use?
Couldn't be further from my experience. They would always eventually stop connecting.
I didn't mention the single cable for everything advantage, that goes without saying.
I've also had basically zero issue with Lightning connectors, but had a constant battle with USB-C of every kind to figure out what's charging, what's data, what's PD, and so much more hassle.
I don't get why Apple was forced to colonize by the EU when they had the market-leading connector in place for significantly longer than USB-C even existed.
"It's only USB2!" Does it have to support the faster USB3 speeds? Not really... we don't have to keep forcing everything to include the latest kitchen sink support.
If apple had made lightning an actual standard everyone was using then the eu might have chosen that instead.
But they didn't. Every single other company/device was using usb(c) and it probably wasn't because of some kind if irrational dislike of words starting with the letter L.
As far as I understand Apple could have still supported an additional lightning port if they really cared about it.
Per gemini for making ligthning accessories you also have to pay 4$ to apple per device that are passed onto the consumer.
I dont know in what way that has to do with colonization.
USB everywhere is nice because you can use the same charger for all kind of devices and dont have to carry multiple with you.
The different kind of specs for usb cables is unfortunate, but you can just buy the highest spec ones and only use them.
It was only 2.5 years between Apple's first device with Lightning (iPhone 5 in September 2012) and their first device with USB-C (12" Macbook in April 2015). It's not like Lightning had a huge track record at that point they just made a decision that they had switched connectors once and didn't want to turn around and do it again. Kind of understandable, but I'm glad to not have Lightning anymore.
Failure to have clear cable capability marking from the start is too bad though, if I needed a high speed USB cable longer than 6" (probably included with a hard drive enclosure or similar) I'm not sure if I own one, and if I do I have no idea which cable it is.
Give it time. I have 10+ year lightning connnectors working great. usb c isn’t quite as sturdy