[llm_nerd]

Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.

To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.

[morshu9001]

They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.

[JimDabell]

You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?

Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.

[morshu9001]

Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.

[brailsafe]

> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?

Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.

That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.

> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?

A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions

[kakacik]

Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for.

This is business 101.

[xp84]

> “Apple came under fire … [for 30-pin]”

So freaking what? Since when does Apple care about what customers whine about? They didn’t actually give a flying fig when users moaned about 30-pin to Lightning, did they? Show me how they apologized or walked that back. Same for the headphone jack. Same for the one-port MacBook 12”. And the MacBook keyboard - until class action got them - they put that garbage in several generations of laptops! The point being, they could have adopted USB-C whenever they wanted to and let the whiners whine — they just didn’t want to.

Stop anthropomorphizing Tim Cook. Apple doesn’t do anything because they feel bad about customer complaints. Apple does things for profit. Profit only. If you disagree, may I point to their recent zeal to buddy up with DJT. Is that a principled embrace of that dude? Or are they just weighting anything that isn’t profit at zero and then making the rational decision from there.

[morshu9001]

At least they put back HDMI on the MBP

[bigstrat2003]

> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽

Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.

[JustExAWS]

There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning.

And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?

[morshu9001]

USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.

[JustExAWS]

You didn’t real need a transition, just USB C to USB 2.0 cords and USB C to HDMI cords.

Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.

[morshu9001]

The video dongles never worked reliably, especially early on. The USB-A adapters were less bad but still annoying. The end result was that everyone bought docks. Same as how removing jack didn't result in people using dongles, they bought AirPods.

[cyberax]

No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.

[JustExAWS]

I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.

[morshu9001]

Same here. They tended to stop working, not because of a shoddy cable but because the phone rejects it.

[llm_nerd]

>iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.

Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over.

The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.

[morshu9001]

Their own cables were the most fragile things ever invented. There's no reason for that other than selling more cables. And it's not just about revenue, it's about control/lockin.

It's striking, iPhones have always been top except for charging. They were always dead cause the cables were so unreliable and difficult to find. Finally that's fixed, rare thanks to the EU.

[ricw]

Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.

They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…

[giantrobot]

USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.

[KK7NIL]

> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime.

USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?

> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.

This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.

Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.

[anamax]

> This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.

The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares.

The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....

[Dylan16807]

Have you ever seen either kind of port break on the inside?

This speculation is just as weak without any evidence.

[tpmoney]

I did wind up replacing the USB C ports on a 4 year old computer recently because it was dodgy as hell. When i got it under the microscope it the longer bus power pin contacts (and one or two of the others) had been badly worn/squished/stretched in a way that I guess was causing them to bridge to other pins. I assume some USB-C cable had some gunk in the connector which was hard enough to damage the contacts on the center blade, and the user didn't notice (because how often do you look into the end of your USB-C cable?). It probably presented as a cable that wasn't seating right or didn't go all the way in and whatever was inside probably fell out when it was removed and they tried again.

And for what it's worth, damage to the center blade does seem to be a common failure mode for USB-C and mini-usb connectors. Less frequent for something like HDMI but it does seem to happen from time to time. Lightning never felt like it locked in as securely as USB connectors do, but at the same time, every time I saw a damaged lightning connector it was always on the male (and therefore usually cheaper accessory) side.

[klausa]

I've had multiple USB-C chargers broken like this.

Now, admittedly, "being yanked by a robot vacuum and falling on the ground" is outside the design parameters for a port; but I absolutely had USB-C ports fail in a way that Lightning would have not.

(Not the person you're replying to, but also a "Lightning was a better physical connector than USB-C" weirdo.)

[lwkl]

I have seen multiple USB-C ports break on Lenovo and HP laptops. About 1 in every 50 laptops over the span of 2-3 years. I don't know if it was the users fault or a manufacturing issue. But the manufacturers fixed these under the extended warranty.

It might be an issue with the USB-C port used in these laptops since the ports on MacBooks feel less wobbly to me. But in the end this is just speculation and anecdotal.

[cyberax]

At the same time, if the springs on the iPhone-side connector loosen and can't hold onto the cable, you have to replace the whole phone and not just the cable.

So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.

[jdiff]

My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface.

There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.

[vel0city]

I find it's often lint in the USB-C port. Cleaning it out with a non-conductive tool like a toothpick or a dry toothbrush usually solves it for me when that happenens.

[cyberax]

I've had dozens of devices with USB-C. I've yet to have even a single one that had any problems with them. To be fair, I'm using iPhones mostly for app testing, so I also had very few issues with them.

What do you guys all do with your devices?!?

[bashkiddie]

Your Pixel 8 could be about two years old. The connector performed way under spec and you should send it in for repair (assuming your are in a country with a 2 year warranty period)

[jdiff]

Unfortunately we're nearing the anniversary of the warranty's expiration.

[nl]

My lightning connector on my iPhone 12 is completely unreliable - I need to twist the phone against the cable to get it to change.

Fortunately MagSafe works fine!

[stouset]

This is probably lint buildup. You can scrape it out with any thin and stiff object like a safety pin.

A small amount of lint gets into the hole. You pack it in when you plug in the cable. Repeat a thousand times and now you have a stiff “plug” of lint that prevents the connector from fully entering your device.

[stouset]

My own empirical evidence suggests that USB-C ports stop holding tightly onto cables after light to moderate use.

To be fair, Lightning ports were prone to being clogged with lint, but that was fixable in twenty seconds with a safety pin.

[f33d5173]

My experience is that plugs from the same manufacturer as the device tend to keep holding tightly, but mixing makers is unreliable. Apple plugs in particular tend to slide out of my samsung phone really easily. I guess whoever speced usbc didn't bother with the details of how it would stay in, and every manufacturer figured out their own solution.

[bdangubic]

exactly!

[yearolinuxdsktp]

The 10K cycle insertion rating for USB-C is an idealized metric that does not include lateral force, torque, device movement, or real-world wear patterns. These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.

USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.

In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.

[KK7NIL]

> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.

I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.

Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.

> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.

> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.

That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.

> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.

That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.

[BenjiWiebe]

*moot point

[cesarb]

> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

Are you sure it's the center tongue which takes all the stress, and not the round shell?

AFAIK, USB-C is designed so that the cable breaks before the port, because the parts which wear the most with use (the contact and retention springs) are in the cable, not on the device.

[PunchyHamster]

Incorrect. You want springy bits on part that is easily replaceable - the cable. USB-C does that, the springy bits are in the connector, not the socket.

My phone is now 6 years old, zero problems on usb-c connector

[ebbi]

Did they give reasons for why they don't like the change?

[llm_nerd]

"I know Apple engineers working on the phone"

Groan. Come on. Cite one. A single "Apple engineer" to support this ridiculous claim of insider knowledge. What year do you think it is?

You understand that the SoC and I/O blocks are largely shared between the Mac and the iPad / iPhone now, right? This invention of some big bifurcation is not reality based. The A14 SoC (which became the foundation for the Mac's M1) had I/O hardware to support USB-C all the ways back to the iPhone 12. Which makes sense as this chipset was used in iPads that came with USB-C.

Pretty weird for hardware that is largely the same to "not like each others standards".

[klausa]

The I/O blocks are similar, but very much not the same between the different Axy/Mz chips.

They're different even between A19 Pro in an iPhone Air and the one in 17 Pros! The Air one doesn't support 10Gbps USB-C.

[llm_nerd]

Well sure, they're iterating between models. But in many cases they're quite literally copy/pasting designs. Any imagined separation between the hardware teams is fantasy based. The comment I replied to is nonsensical.

"They're different even between A19 Pro in an iPhone Air and the one in 17 Pros"

The SoC and I/O blocks are quite literally identical. An A19 Pro is an A19 Pro, aside from binning for core disables. The difference is in the wiring and physical connector on the device which puts a ceiling on the features supported, one of which is 10Gbps. The Air famously includes some new "3D printed" super thin Titanium USB-C port, using the 4 pins rather than the "pro" 9 pin 10Gbps capable connector. The SoC is identical, they just only wired it up for USB 2.0.

[PunchyHamster]

EU kinda failed with it once before, they pushed for phone vendors to get to common standard https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...

didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"

[dickersnoodle]

It's conceivably politically incorrect to use this reference, but Apple was begging the EU not to throw them into that briar patch.

[llm_nerd]

Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial

Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.

[gambiting]

>> which they were already almost completely done doing

Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?

[techpression]

They openly said why, millions upon millions of devices (speakers etc) people wanted to use with lightning connectors. There was never a good time and EU putting a deadline on it gets Apple free of the e-waste accusations.

[hshdhdhj4444]

No one was accusing Apple of e-waste when for decades the world had decided common standards were a great way to reduce e-waste.

Outside of America this has been obvious since the mid 2000s when people complained about a proliferation of chargers with phones because pre-iPhone the non US cellphone market was far more advanced.

[MBCook]

Really? Do you remember the user shit storm when they dumped the dock connector and went to lightning? People wouldn’t shut up for years, even though lightning was way way better.

[jauntywundrkind]

I think this whole narrative being spun here that Good Guy Apple was Being Oppressed by the lowly end users & wanted to do the right thing (be thrown into the briar patch) all along, just never could form the political will for it and needed EU intervention is some insane fucking weird ass made up nonsense. WTF wtf wtf? Surely you must be joking.

Apple has had MfI certification on Apple compatible products for decades & has actively wanted to protect that revenue stream & domain of control. If folks could just plug in devices & have them just work, that would erode their ownership.

And just as bad, it would raise all sorts of questions like "why does this mouse not do anything on my iPhone" and obscure the careful market delineations Apple vigorously has established between its products (which makes people buy more products than they need). Apple never wanted to be a good guy, Apple never wanted to lower itself to the common market of peripherals and standards. Their involvement with USB-C was likely far far far before it was apparent their device teams would have to give up MfI controls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program

[smallmancontrov]

Because they were getting a reputation for churning the ports too quickly

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyTA33HQZLA&t=19s

and then they went all-USBC on the MBP before the ecosystem was ready, got absolutely slammed for it, and went back (on magsafe). 4 times bitten, once shy. I'm sure the cynical money reason played a role too, of course, but nobody else is mentioning the 4 times bitten so I felt obliged.

[crazygringo]

Seriously.

I upgraded my iPad to a USB-C version and discovered I couldn't use my 1st-gen (Lightning) Apple Pencil with it even though it's compatible -- because I first had to buy a special female-female USB-C<->Lightning dongle just to be able to plug it in to pair it. (Even though I can keep using my Lightning charger to charge it separately from my iPad.)

Moving from Lightning to USB-C hasn't been too bad for me since I use wireless charging with e.g. my Lightning AirPods. But the transition is a huge pain. Because of weird cases like the Pencil, it's not even enough to just have a USB-C charging cable and a Lightning charging cable.

[MBCook]

I wouldn’t blame USB-C for that, personally.

The Pencil situation is a disaster. There are at least 3 first party versions plus the 3rd party ones. And when version X + 1 comes out they don’t drop support for version X, they use it in a different product for some stupid reason. Probably because the tooling already exists.

So you can find entire matrices online attempting to explain which iPads support which pencils.

It’s horrible. The Lightning -> USB-C transition is probably one of least objectionable parts of pencil history.

[Dylan16807]

The MBP would only be an example if they were scared of being too new to USB-C on phones. That stopped being possible once a quarter of new phones were USB-C. So they weren't scared of that.

[llm_nerd]

Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change.

And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users.

In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.

[koyote]

> In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector

Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible?

USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.

[MBCook]

GP meant Lightning. It was reversible.

You are correct, the dock connector for was not.

And they couldn’t go to USB-C instead of Lightning initially as Lightning came out first.

[llm_nerd]

Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018.

A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years.

The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.

[systemtest]

Don't forget the USB 3.0 micro-B on the Galaxy S2, the 18-pin connector, the 20-pin connector, mini-USB and various barrel connectors. USB-C was a blessing for Samsung, they could finally ditch their sub-par connectors.

[stouset]

I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer).

The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.

[tristanj]

My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device.

EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.

[stouset]

This was a common trope on Reddit but makes literally zero sense. There are a ton of wired accessories that this would make completely useless overnight, including things like CarPlay.

And for what?

[tristanj]

You probably viewed this as a common trope because you were not aware of the actual source of the rumors. No, these are not claims are not from reddit, they're from Mark Gurman in 2018.

> Apple designers eventually hope to remove most of the external ports and buttons on the iPhone, including the charger, according to people familiar with the company’s work. During the development of the iPhone X, Apple weighed removing the wired charging system entirely. That wasn’t feasible at the time because wireless charging was still slower than traditional methods. [0]

Actual rumors include a prototype of said phone making rounds around the office.

And again, Mark Gurman from 2025:

> "But all of these changes were supposed to be just the tip of the iceberg: Apple had originally hoped to get ever more ambitious with this model... An even bigger idea was to make the Air device Apple’s first completely port-free iPhone. That would mean losing the USB-C connector and going all-in on wireless charging and syncing data with the cloud."

> "But Apple ultimately decided not to adopt a port-free design with the new iPhone, which will still have a USB-C connector. One major reason: There were concerns that removing USB-C would upset European Union regulators, who mandated the iPhone switch to USB-C and are scrutinizing the company’s business practices." [1]

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/why-apple...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-16/apple-...

[raw_anon_1111]

This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?

[xp84]

This is a silly reason to hold back if that was their plan. You can buy, for $20 and up, little USB-sticks that allow wired-CarPlay cars to do wireless CarPlay. Apple could manufacture 100 million of those, at a cost of $5 for the boards and maybe $8 in glass and aluminum, and sell them at a huge profit for $79.99 and advertise them as a revolutionary breakthrough they invented.

Wired CarPlay is not holding Apple back. I think they just figure it’d be harder for them to repair partially-bricked iPhones if they had no port to do DFU or whatever. That or they actually have done the market research and customers said they’d hold off on buying a portless iPhone because it’s a stupid idea.

[tristanj]

My statements are substantiated by sources going back almost a decade. See my other comment for details.

And when you view what Apple is doing from their long-term vision of the iPhone becoming a transparent piece of glass, it starts making sense.

[LexGray]

Illogical may not be the right word. We have already reached the point of passible.

WiFi speeds are decent for data.

Wireless charging is 2 hours to a full quick charge and efficiency gets better every generation.

As for wired CarPlay somebody would make dongles.

[1718627440]

I share that view, but I don't think Apple would care. I mean Ethernet is way better than Wifi, yet the iPhones don't have an Ethernet port.

[icehawk]

People spent a whole decade complaining about the iPod dock -> Lightning change.

I'd wait to blame the EU also.

[hshdhdhj4444]

> but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede

There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.

[nozzlegear]

Apple likely didn't want the precedent or bad press of the EU mandating changes in their supply chain.

[systemtest]

Do you have any sources that "Apple fought the EU" regarding USB-C?

[frizlab]

Absolutely. It is excessively obvious and I don’t understand how not much more of a common take that is.