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by lxgr 455 days ago
At least as far as I can tell, this seems to be a solved problem. USB-C ports on iPhones are holding up just fine.

I'll take a 1% higher chance of a port wearing out over a 100% chance of needing to always carry two cables and not being able to share accessories with Android users any day.
1 comments
literalAardvark 455 days ago
The port connector is more reliable on USB-C.

The fine springy wiry bits that are impossible to clean and easy to damage are on the cable, which is a massive improvement. See: the super common broken Ethernet ports.

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emchammer 455 days ago
For those of us who used to fix PCBs and wire breadboards, it’s nice to see the traces are still there, like knowing where your food comes from, even if any hope of an analog baseband project is long past. Lightning is one of Apple’s hits.
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literalAardvark 454 days ago
Yeah, let's make more things the wrong way for the nostalgic aesthetic.

I'm old enough to have done that, and to really miss the old world, but an improvement is an improvement.

None of the stuff I grew up with is "hackable" anymore. None of the design constraints of small, sleek, performant, high battery life and secure are amenable to that.

Even (production) Linux has stopped being a hacker's paradise and is tightening the rope.

And that's what the iPhone is: a production phone.

You want some cool toys? Get Arduinos, hacker laptops, RPis, Arch.

It's all still out there, but not every device needs to have its guts out.

That being said I will always miss SoftIce, being able to look stuff up in memory, being able to look stuff up in network traffic... alas, it's gone, and the truth is we're better off for it.

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