[dheera]

But please, please, PLEASE design a better connector than fragile USB-C.

120VAC plugs e.g. standard IEC computer power plugs can be hit with bricks and rammed into furniture while they are plugged in and they won't get damaged. All forces of impact get transferred to the chassis, not the PCB. That's good design.

I break about a USB-C cable a week because they just aren't designed for the ruggedness that consumer use cases demand, which are typically higher than military.

[yoz-y]

> I break about a USB-C cable a week

I don’t know… that seems excessive, even people I’ve known to handle all of their stuff like it’s free have managed to go mostly through 1-2 cables a year.

[dheera]

I mean, the people who design this stuff don't do any user research, they sit in offices and think everyone else sits in offices.

Reality is if you go out at all you've probably figured out that phones only come with 1/2 day of real battery life (because they do the damn factory tests with full bars of reception, not real world 1-bar reception), and you needed to charge a phone stuffed in one pocket with a battery in the other pocket, connected by a USB-C cable, and bike, ski, run, hike, climb rocks, whatever it is. Or had to use a laptop in a bus where an asshole plops their heavy ass next to you and you accidentally ram your laptop and USB-C connector into the side wall. Or because pants are designed with only 2 instead of 3 front pockets, one is occupied by wallet and another by a big fat keyring, you have no cohice but to put phone in your back pocket and battery in the other back pocket with a wire between the two and sit on it while plugged in. Or had to stuff your charging phone and battery into a jacket, crumple the whole thing and stuff it into a TSA bin. Or children bite your cables. Or dogs. Or the phone was in the car with a suction cup holder and fell off ramming its USB-C cable into some hard part of the car floor. THIS is daily consumer life.

If one hasn't experienced the above, they probably sit in an office all day and work out in a gym and are oblivious to the realities of active lifestyles and how they are highly incompatible with physically weak connectors like USB-C.

[yoz-y]

To me it seems that those use cases would require a massive and rugged connector like the computer mains plug. Realistically I suppose the solution is to have some sort of a bag. For me when hiking or biking I always charge my phone in the backpack/saddlebag/front bike pouch. For the laptop on knees it might be preferable to have a plug on the back (usb-c charging has the advantage that it can have multiple options, at least right/left side. Another option is angled cables mostly immune to slamming from the side and somewhat resilient to angular momentum due to small size.

For chewed cables I agree. But again to actually make a resilient cable it would need to be thicker than most modern phones, the connector is not the weak point here.

[dheera]

I mean, 1/8" headphone jack connectors were super strong, they were about the same size as USB-C and much, much more rugged.

Also you could easily miniaturize an IEC power cable, it's the material and design that makes it good, not the size. Rubbery plastic and all forces transferred to housing not the PCB.

[stevenhuang]

Sounds like you need to replace your phone's battery. I get 3 days charge with pretty heavy use from my moto g power. Much of your charging woes would disappear after that, charging only at night.

[dheera]

Here come the excuses. No, I don't. My phone battery dies quickly because I use it. It's on 100% brightness (because you can't see the screen with any less than 100% in the California sun) providing GPS navigation when I'm on bike rides, sometimes recording timelapses and videos for part of it (sounds like what phones were made for, right?). Then I get to some destination and I need to have a Google Meet call with video on. Maybe hang out in a park and code for a while using phone as a 5G hotspot for my laptop and constant VPN into my office. All these are pretty normal use cases to me, the 1 full day battery life is bullshit if you actually use your phone. Then battery is dead, on the way home USB-C cable between my pocket and the phone mounted at the front. Then sometimes I dismount the bike on short notice and USB-C cable yanks and gets deformed, sometimes even damaging the USB-C port. Really shitty design. Their designers probably never bike.

They should look at Zojirushi water boiler magnetic plugs. You can yank them all you want and they don't deform. They're designed to be yanked off accidentally by children without bringing down a pot of boiling water from the counter. They just need to miniaturize the concept.

[eropple]

What you describe isn't far off of my own use of a year-old iPhone 11 and I get a full day and then some.

Maybe Apple's battery life is That Much Better, but I've been led to believe it no longer is.

[__MatrixMan__]

I've never broken one, but every few months I have to use a needle to scrape the pocket lint out of the port on my phone. Never had that problem with previous phones.