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Comment by ytjohn | Hacker News Reader

> if dongles are required for everything from iPhones

I never understood this complaint. AFAIK, I've never seen a macbook with a lightning port or the older 13-pin iphone port. If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable. Then you can use the macbook to charge your phone, or the usb-c charger that charges your laptop to charge your phone. Or yes, you can get a usb-c to usb-a dongle - but you can just as easily get the appropriate cable. I'm also seeing that Apple is going to start producing usb-c chargers for iphones and ipads (with a usb-c to lightning cable) in the near future.

I'm a macbook + android user, so I've had USB-C phones for a while, so now I can use the same cable and charger for my laptop or my phone.

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> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.

iPhones don't come with these, so it basically means you have to go out and buy another cable, which won't work with any of the wall charger power bricks that came with your previous iPhones. I understand a change needs to be made at some point, but it's strange for Apple to ship computers with no ports that are compatible with their iPhones.

iPhone syncs on WiFi to Mac. I do not charge my phone with my laptop. I have an inductive charger on my desk at home, desk at work, table next to bed. I just set the phone on it.

I guess that works great for people who spend hundreds of dollars on inductive chargers!

I work in many environments and just bring a charge cable with me.

Of course, the iphone was just one of many things that I was noting isn’t compatible. External hard drives? Thumb drives? SD cards? All easily plugged into my previous Apple laptop, but require a dongle here. I have a mini-hub, but even that isn’t great because it can’t charge anything.

Anker Wireless Charger Charging Pad for iPhone 8 / 8 Plus, iPhone X, Galaxy Note 5, S7/S7 Edge/S6/S6 Edge/S6 Edge Plus, Nexus 4/5/6/7, LG G3 and Other Devices

$9.99 on Amazon. So I spent $30.

Glad they're cheap now! I stand corrected on that point. Curious to know your thoughts on the question of hard drives etc. Seems to me like Apple jumped the gun here.

Eh, is what it is. I recently swapped my MacBook Pro with TB for a MacBook. The HD is plugged into the Apple (LG) 4K. It runs at USB2 in this setup. I duplicated the same keyboard, mouse, monitor, HD at work and at home. I like 1 cable and the smaller size of the monitor given the resolution works fine. For me, the size and weight of the laptop was key due to 150K miles a year on a plane. Does the rsync of the HD to the home NAS take longer, yup. Does it matter, no. It’s a script that runs when the device is plugged in, in the background. If I need to do heavy lifting, CPU, compile, etc, I ssh to a rack of build servers in a colo. 3 racks of 48 cores a blade with a huge SSD NAS and 10G or 25G NICs sort everything. It is really about YOUR workflow and what works for you. My laptop is pretty much a window to google docs and for everything technical it is pretty much the same as a dumb X terminal. It works for me as my goal workflow is always the same no matter where I am.

> If someone had an iphone, they had a USB-A to lighnting cable. Now they need a USB-C to lightning cable.

The problem is that when they purchased the iPhone, it came with said cable.

I purchased an iPhoneX this year and it comes with, you guessed it, a USB-A cable. So in order to connect it to my new Apple laptop I need to buy either a $20 cable or a special dongle? If Apple wants to go all in on USB-C then they shouldn’t still be shipping their top of the line “futuristic” phone with USB-A cables.

But obviously they already know that they would have gotten many dissatisfied customers complaining about having to buy a cable just to ‘connect their phone to their iTunes’ if they did that.

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