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Comment by ropiku | Hacker News Reader

Apple already had their standard before there was USB-C. Do you think yet another port migration would be well received ?

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I'm not talking about USB-C.

I'm talking about the ability to walk off an airplane, in any country in the world, and having forgotten both my charging cable and my charger, I can find a plain old USB port somewhere[1] and someone (possibly my hotel) can hand me a plain old USB cable and I can charge my (device).

[1] On my own laptop, preferably.

To be honest, if you walk off an airplane, almost anywhere you will be able to buy a missing cable you may have misplaced to charge any popular hardware at most for the price of a lunch or two.

Also, hotels have cables.

Yes, there are parts of the world where the above does not hold, but did you really mean ANY country in the world?

I get where you're going. But I can't just recall any travel or situation where iPhone cables were not available.

At least they succeeded in being popular enough to be practical.

What the fuck is wrong with people in these comments? You're not the only one ranting about "lost cables". Are there really this many people who are so incompetent in life that they're losing their cables every other week? Feel free to bash the lack of standards; but please stop talking about some theoretical scenario that 99.99% of users never encounter. If you're going to lose your cable, you may as well leave behind your wallet, keys, phone, and the lint that was in your pocket to boot. May as well leave your brain behind on the plane too, if you're so incapable of holding onto your personal property.

You are correct that Lightning predated USB type C, but Lightning is proprietary and thus is not a standard.

It certainly is a standard, it's just a proprietary one. The word "standard" does not mean it has to be open and free for anyone to implement.

That's actually exactly what "standard" means in a discussion where people know we're likely referencing ISO and IEEE.

Nobody mentioned ISO or IEEE. You're projecting your own expectations onto a conversation that did not even reference them.

When people talk about whether a cable is "standard" or not, they are drawing distinctions between different types of cable. By your definition every cable is standard, or at least every cable that can connect to two models by the same manufacturer. That's a useless definition. People don't mean that, they mean something adopted by ISO/IEEE or similarly available for anyone to use with a lot of adopters.

No, a "standard" means something that's well-defined that multiple parties can implement. Something that only one manufacturer can use is not a standard because nobody else can do it. Lightning is a standard, other people can and do make lightning cables and accessories, it's just a proprietary standard and AIUI requires you to be part of the Made For iPhone program.

They can make accessories. Sometimes. They can't make host devices.

That's actually an interesting point. Is it true, though? AFAIK you have to actually be a member of the MFi program to see its terms (and the terms are under NDA), so I don't know what the exact restrictions are. I'm certainly not aware of any non-Apple devices with a lightning port on them, but I'm struggling to think of who would actually make such a device. The only reason I can think of for this is if you want to make a wireless device that charges over a lightning cable, but it's almost certainly a lot cheaper for such a device to just charge over USB instead of trying to charge over lightning anyway, and the only reason to want lightning is if you want your users to be able to charge your device with the same cable they use to charge their iPhone, but nobody seems to care about that sort of thing.

Which is to say, this may very well be true, but the lack of third-party devices with lightning ports can also easily be explained as just nobody wants to do that.

Yes, if means less lock-in and more interoperability, like using the same headphones with both Android and iOS.

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