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EU Sets Official Deadline for When iPhone Must Switch to USB-C
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Nah, I may not be particularly fond of the EU, but I love my country. I have no intention to leave it. Besides, I'm sure such annoyances, as well as useless politicians with nothing better to do than interfere with people's lives just for the sake of it, can be found in every country. I will stay here and make the most of the situation, but that doesn't mean I won't complain when I have the chance.
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So think about this. I have three iPhones all using Lightning. I have two AirPods both using Lightning. I also have a bunch of cables and dongles. I only need Lightning now. If I get an iPhone 15 with USB C - now I need two sets of cables until everything gets rotated out.
Without the EU, Apple would have gone straight to wireless and dropped the port - with courage. But now we will have people salivating for the old USB C only to have it disappear as quickly as it appeared. That is incredible waste!
Headphone jack gone, sim tray gone, movable buttons gone - and how long will it take for the USB C port to go? In two years the people claiming they won’t have their first child till their iPhone has USB C, will now be prattling how only Neanderthals want a cable connection. You just watch, but I may just jump from Lightning to nothing as in no charging/data port.
Without the EU, Apple would have gone straight to wireless and dropped the port - with courage. But now we will have people salivating for the old USB C only to have it disappear as quickly as it appeared. That is incredible waste!
Headphone jack gone, sim tray gone, movable buttons gone - and how long will it take for the USB C port to go? In two years the people claiming they won’t have their first child till their iPhone has USB C, will now be prattling how only Neanderthals want a cable connection. You just watch, but I may just jump from Lightning to nothing as in no charging/data port.
Still will let in water if you leave it submerged long enough. You can’t ignore that…
No port means you can't use your phone while it's charging. I wouldn't like that.
Also, it means no CarPlay unless you change your car as well. That alone would be a show stopper for me.
Also, it means no CarPlay unless you change your car as well. That alone would be a show stopper for me.
30 minutes is more than enough time to get your phone out of the water. The USB port can be sealed just as well as the screen, back glass, speakers, camera bump, microphone, front speaker, etc. are. Removing the port still leaves plenty of places for water to get in so its not like that's going bump the phone up from IP68 to IP69.
I bet the firewire 400 port is thicker than the iPhone now. Ah technology.
Travel, yes, but only as a visitor for up to 90 days at a time. Previously, a UK citizen could live and work in any EU country they liked without having to apply for a visa.
Fair point. Of course, that had the drawback that EU citizens could also live and work in the UK, which most of your fellow citizens didn't seem to like.
But still, this inconvenience aside, you can now live according to your own rules, which are made by your own government and parliament, which are elected by you. If you don't like what they are doing, you can vote them out of the office and elect someone else. Whereas we, for all the ease of travel and work, must obey an indistinct remote entity which isn't under our direct control, and which treats us as second-class citizens. And we can't do anything about it. If we don't like it, tough luck. I'm not sure the trade-off was really worth it.
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The current models support USB Power Delivery 3.0 with PPS over lightning, up to 30W on the iPhone 14 Pro.
I suspect they have had some engineering concerns with the USB-C port, which is generally less well designed. My understanding is that they submitted the lightning design for consideration for USB-C, but the ports simply cost more to manufacture.
I suspect they have just taken a really wide path to transitioning to USB-C because they make so damn many phones, and people have such a cache built up of old chargers and cables. They focused on getting people to switch to USB-C chargers before getting USB-C cabling.
30W is the limit of what they certify lightning-to-USB-C cable for, so I suspect they have already been getting close to a switch-over. They may have been planning to upgrade the Pro phone first, but the EU mandate provides a scapegoat to just cut everything over sooner.
Nah, They are the same power management systems already in use. the only thing lightning does special with USB charging is support the old pull-up resistor scheme of Apple's for USB-A (for > 2.5W charging)
I think you don't understand why we have politicians in society. Their job is specifically to make laws to make society move in an organized way towards something hopefully better. If this didn't happen, individuals would never reach agreements among themselves. We could argue that politicians often make bad decisions, and that society is not necessarily getting better thanks to them, but in this specific case, I think this is the perfect example of a good decision that makes everyone's lives better that has literally zero bad consequences. I honestly cannot think of a single valid reason why anyone would prefer Lightning over USB-C. Can you give any reasons? And no "I already have a bunch of lightning cables in my backpack" is not a valid reason, because you probably also have as many USB-C cables.
And if your main concern is politicians governing your life, then I'm sorry to say but every electronic device already adheres to laws made by politicians in order to comply to things you've never even heard about. This is just one law among many others, it just happens to be in the news. Did you know that radio frequencies are also regulated? And battery sizes? And cable insulation? All these things that you already use are already being regulated and you never even knew, but you do enjoy the joys of your cables not shorting out, your batteries not exploding as much as they could, and radio frequencies actually being compatible with each other on a daily basis. If manufacturers were allowed to do whatever they wanted, then they would just give you the cheapest, lowest quality that they could get away with and then not take responsibility when things went wrong. Thanks to laws they are forced to adhere to a number of rules that may not benefit the company, but benefit the world instead.
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It doesn't matter. Whether I prefer the one or the other should be up to me to decide, not up to a politician. I don't need anyone to tell me what I may or may not use, or what I should or should not like. I will use whatever I please.
What's next? The EU mandating all shoe manufacturers to make only brown shoes, because those are deemed the most beautiful and fashionable, and all other colours are deemed officially ugly? Or banning zippers and mandating that all jackets must have buttons from now on, then saying, "oh, but buttons are so much better, I can't think of a single valid reason why anyone would prefer a zipper"?
As I said, I don't have a preference for either Lightning or USB-C. But I loathe political interference just for interference's sake. If, by pure chance, something good may occasionally come from this interference, that doesn't make it more acceptable.
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Of course I knew that. And I'm glad it is so.
But those regulations are necessary for things to work properly without interference, or to be safe to use, or things like that. Whereas imposing one specific kind of plug when many others would be just as good, is an arbitrary rule made up just for the sake of it. Just like imposing that we all wear brown shoes.
It's not the same thing.
I'm happy for the government to regulate food production in order to ensure it's safe (e.g. limit the permissible amounts of additives), but not for it to ban steaks and to impose that we all eat broccoli from now on. Even if I were a vegetarian who loved broccoli, I would still be against it, and I would start eating meat just to spite them.
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The only issue I have with zippers is on heavier coats sometimes it likes to get caught on the fabric. And I'd much rather have snaps before buttons