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Comment by soperj | Hacker News Reader

And yet, lots of people don't avoid Apple.

> And yet, lots of people don't avoid Apple.

On one hand, having to use Apple's proprietary Lightning connector sucks.

On the other, having Apple be heavy handed with iOS App Store submissions means I have a higher confidence with my iOS Apps behaving compared to those I install on my Android Device.

The Lightning connector being proprietary does suck, but it's far and away the best mobile device connector I've used. It's small, easy to connect, and disconnects fairly easily on tug. USB-C is pretty nice, but for similar feature set you have a much larger connector.

Lightning and USB-C aren't really comparable because USB-C supports USB 3.1 while Lightning is limited to USB 2 speeds for everything, including video out. Which means that Apple have to compress the video out and stick an entire ARM SoC in their very expensive AV adapter to decompress it, and this degrades the picture quality. By comparison, USB-C can carry uncompressed HD video, power, and a fast USB 3 data link at the same time using (at least in theory) cheap, mostly-passive adapters.

The latest iPad Pro IIRC has some sort of post-2 chip (I just don't remember if it's 3 or 3.1), it's just not being used yet. The connector itself has 16 total pins available, and the plug has 8. Since the Type C connector is 18 pins with 2 being orientation detection and 4 being ground, it's still possible to have the Lightning connector itself support 3.1 by actually using both sides at the same time instead of just one at a time; although those extra 2 pins would be handy.

So in terms of the connector itself, they're still pretty comparable, it's just that Apple for whatever reason didn't want to add support for it.

Edit: Cleared up some things that were actually untrue after researching it a bit more.

The iPad pro is actually able to use the USB 3 chip with the new SD card adapter Apple just released.

The thing that deters me from ever writing something for iOS is that you have to own a Mac to do it.

Being pedantic, you can actually get iOS Dev machines hosted in the cloud, so technically you wouldn't have to own a mac.

I do not believe this is true now given all the third party frameworks available.

From what I understand you still need Xcode to sign the package with your developer key to either load it onto a device to test or to send it off to the app store. Though that might not be the case anymore as I haven't looked in a long time.

I don't find that having a Mac helps me with the code signing all that much. It just doesn't work sometimes.

Apple's EULA actually requires you to build iOS software on a Mac. Using a PC is not a legal option.

Breaking the EULA is not the same thing as doing something illegal.

That's not wrong but they still can kick you out of their walled garden which can up being far more expensive than the cost of a mac.

Had anyone ever tried to challenge this in a court?

Some jurisdictions have customer protection laws that say it's illegal to require purchase of some goods (or services) as a condition for purchase of other goods (or services). Don't know English legal terms for this, sorry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

I don't think so. This is more like selling printers that are only compatible with your printer ink cartridges.

Which frameworks?

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