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Comment by ilovecomputers | Hacker News Reader

It's firewire all over again. They'll never learn.

They sort of tried to let FireWire be a standard, and it never caught on. So for lightning, they didn't bother. Sounds like the learned their lesson about making standards.

USB-C is kind of a big mess. Reversable connector is nice, but power is wonky, alternative nodes are wonky, everybody wants to add more alternative modes to the point where the only thing universal about it is the conbector (and usb 2 compatibility)

There are plenty of rumors of Apple moving to USB-C in 2019 models.

There were plenty of rumors of Apple moving to USB-C for the 2018 models too, and zero excuses for them not to.

And dozens of rumors for the last 10 months from supposed financial authorities that the iPhone X was dead.

I've given up on Apple rumors. Especially anything from a business web site. Nothing is good since the death of Think Secret.

If it's not on Apple's web site, it didn't happen and isn't going to happen.

Heck, even then Apple has its own vaporware.

I'm reasonably sure they'll switch either to USB-C or something they find even better (which could very well be inductive charging only, no connector), but there were plenty of rumours about adopting all flavors of usb before they switched to lightning too.

> They sort of tried to let FireWire be a standard, and it never caught on.

Firewire is a standard — IEEE 1394.

What do you mean? FireWire wasn’t widely adopted in the consumer market, but who cares? Most digital video cameras at the time supported FireWire as well as laptops from Sony and the higher end laptops from Dell.

There wasn’t any dirth of hardware for people who needed it and where it made sense.

And cable boxes used to be required, by law, to have firewire connections. I used that little loophole to request a different cable box from Comcast, then shoved the Firewire plug into a MacBook so I could record TV on it.

(The firewire port was required because many early large projection HDTV sets had Firewire video ports and the FCC didn't want to suddenly obsolete millions of early adopters.)

Learn what? They've gone from near bankruptcy in 1997 to the the most valuable company on the planet in 2017, so it's not like firewire hurt them (or anybody cared much about it except some video and audio pros).

I know a lot of regular people who got external Firewire drives with their Macs in the late 00's. My dad has a good pile with old photos on them.

It was significantly faster than USB2 in practice. I sold my external FW drives not that long ago, was using them with a FW-Thunderbolt adapter for quite a few years ago.

I bought FireWire drives in the early '10s too. Although USB3 was available, FireWire drives still tend to be cheaper.

I got a couple as well. But the huge majority of the population didn't. Most PCs didn't even come with such ports...

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