[notepad0x90]

We do see competition there, iMessage is superior, so many android apps try to emulate it. thunderbolt was around before USB 4, lightning was before USB-C, the Apple appstore is still a model of better quality/security. You can see google trying to emulate that and requiring devs to id themselves (competition isn't always pleasant). Why would you spend making something better, if it doesn't give your company a competitive edge? If you're forced to help your competition have the same capability, where is the ROI?

> Apple considers themselves above competition

In literally every market apple is in, they have intense competition!?

> they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone

Ugh.. yeah.. shouldn't they be allowed to sell things that they believe will sell well? I mean on one hand people complain about cheap devices engineered with planned obsolescence, and then you complain about what.. better quality? If they believe it is a superior system, then certain, I want that as a consumer. Why don't you? And I also thing being able to buy a different phone is great, that means no monopolies, that's what we all want right?

> neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.

I am getting a superior hardware and software for apple. What his happening now is, for no amount of money I could possibly earn can I get a good quality product, I have to settle with EU's forced mediocrity even though I don't live in the EU. People who can't afford apple products have alternatives, but that isn't enough for you, you want everyone to get participation trophies? that's what it sounds like, i could be wrong, it sounds like you don't want to feel envious of people who get superior products? Even though there are many android phones more expensive than iPhones, so it isn't even a question of affordability. it's just forced mediocrity. With no upsides to anyone other than people who feel great about "america bad" "middle finger to apple".

[bigyabai]

Problem is, what you're describing is not competition. Apple is not exposed to any commercial threat, their products like iMessage, Safari and the App Store are artificially segregated from free-market pressures. Nothing can dethrone them, period. The only way to create a true competitor to these apps is to receive Apple's private entitlements. If you cannot understand that, you won't be able to interpret anyone's antitrust allegations against Apple.

Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love. I don't care if you think Apple's brand appeal is diminished by prosecuting their anticompetitive zeal. That's not my problem. You will have to "settle" for it anywhere iPhones are sold, because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.

[notepad0x90]

Apple is already dethroned, the only market they're doing well at is the US. And even then Android phones are still the majority, apple just tends to make a lot more money in the US. I can't think of a single product where apple is the leader of the market share, but by all means correct me if I'm wrong.

Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, etc.. they're all threats to iMessage. These apps even make themselves the default SMS handler so that the only thing iMessage is good for is native iMessage messages. It isn't distributed outside of Apple ecosystem either unlike its competition, Apple is doing the opposite of dominating the market there.

How is Safari segregated? Most Mac users (including me) install Firefox or Chrome typically. Are you saying Apple doesn't face competition, or are you saying Apple doesn't compete enough (which I don't see how that's a fault?)

I don't think the appstore is particularly more competitive than android's.

The appstore is the only area where there might be legitimate antitrust allegations. Even then, I'm with apple there because it is in the interest of their consumers. You already have the bland and mediocre android, don't ruin apple for the rest of us. Monopoly is exactly what you're advocating for, monopoly of the mediocre and bland. There is absolutley no service or product apple makes where there aren't enough alternatives, or where apple has created an anti-competitive dependency.

> Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love

Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple did it the opposite way, because they make products that last and are durable! with lightning the wear and tear impacts the cable (male) end the most, so it's a matter of replacing cables. with USB-C, the device end needs repair and replacement. Now i'm stuck with your bland mediocre thing. Why am i paying the price for android users' envy?? Same with app store, I don't want b.s. crap android apps, i used android long enough and i hated it, i don't poor quality crap.

Why don't you get that freedom means everyone gets an option, everyone gets to do what they want without harming others. Apple users love apple products. Even when you tell us how android phones have better specs, better hardware, more up to date, we still like apple precisely because of Apple's business practcies that improve the user experience for us. And now you want it to be just like android, why? You have the choice to use android already, why do you need to take away my freedom to use the kind of products apple creates?

I want an extremely closed and gated app store. I want background checks on app developers, forget just ID'ing them. I want it to be a costly endeavor to write iOS apps. I liked lightning, I love iMessage, I recommend it over Signal. I used signal and I have lost a LOT due to it's backup/recovery mess, I've suffered a lot under crappy android apps. airdrop works prefectly, I don't want someone with a buggy/malwared android phone sending airdrops to me, I don't want shoddy android messaging clients sending me imessage messages. Apple is doing what we as its users want. You the majority android users are taking away the choice of the minority apple users.

> because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.

Of course not, but you were hoping for a mass defection. Apple still makes superior products and we get that it is crappy EU law making that is forcing this. What would I defect to if I didn't like USB-C? You took away the one choice I had. Every android device uses USB-C. Your entire platform here is taking away people's choices and freedoms.

You're not helping anyone get on an equal footing, because by your own admission, they were unequal before right? All you've done is take away the choice of apple's users. Did android messages gain anything with iMessage compatiblity? Did android phones gain anything by apple using usb-c? Do android phones benefit from apple allowing more app stores? No, the only people that benefit are crappy developers that spread their mediocrity everywhere. No apple competitor is gaining a competitive advantage by these measures.

There have always been third party lightning cable makers, I can't think of any major app that isn't available on the app store. Consumers aren't complaining about this. I'll concede that having to store both lightning and usb-c is annoying, but hey.. don't buy apple and avoid USB-C!!?? You literally don't have to use apple products. If product design was considered freedom of speech (is it?) you'd be coercing speech and banning speech you disagree with because it annoys you.

This is weaponized enshittification!

[raw_anon_1111]

> Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple

I have one of every Apple device category except the HomePod. But this is a horrible take. I can now use my same USB C cables everywhere.

But more importantly, I can use standard USB C peripherals from network adapters USB C external monitors, standard USB C to HDMI cords, plug a USB C storage device in etc

[notepad0x90]

No, I get there are a lot of people like you, but you did have the choice of just using android didn't you? Governments are not ways to enforce your personal preference or force it on others. Apple felt their lightning tech was better, isn't having better tech and an environment where different ideas can be explored better? EU is already anti-innovation, you don't succeed with startups easily there, it's precisely because of this sort of close minded unimaginative thinking.

I don't care if apple required manually splicing wires to charge your phones (safely), how is it the government's right to force them to not do that? The whole point of having a free society is small things like this. I keep posting long posts on HN, so let me cut it short and say that lots of freedoms can be taken away in the name of convenience to others. Companies should be punished for monopolistic practices, but they shouldn't be punished for imagining alternative ways of doing things and succeeding with that. I've had android phones where the USB connector on the phone end broke or degraded, you can hopefully see my perspective as well? How can we have a free society like this if we can't even resolve and tolerate very small differences of opinion like this?

[raw_anon_1111]

The lightning tech wasn’t better, it could only do USB 2 speeds - yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.

Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads.

You’ve had cheap Android phones if you had that problem. Have you heard reports of that being a problem with iPhones?

As far as compatibility, I carry around an external USB C powered external monitor for my laptop. It gets power and video from one cord on a computer.

I can take that same monitor and that same USB C cord and plug it up to my iPhone.

This is me sitting at a Delta lounge watching either Breaking Bad or Better Caul Saul with my phone connected to my second monitor

https://imgur.com/a/SC6WDri

The iPhone by itself can only power it to 50% brightness. But there you see if I plug in a battery to the second USB C port, it can power the monitor at full brightness and charge my phone.

USB C is better in every way.

[dwaite]

> yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.

Those are two separate things.

These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.

In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.

There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.

So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.

Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.

With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.

USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.

USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.