Apple can own I/O to own the universe
diff.substack.com
diff.substack.com
I'm not sure what alternative to the 30-pin connector the author would have been pleased with. Personally, I'm very glad it wasn't micro or mini USB. The Lightning port was shipping years ahead of something like USB-C. Sure, it would be nice if they switched now. I'm sure even if they used a standard port they'd still have a certification program because Apple loves control. I'm confident the licensing money is just a perk. Look at the iPad Pro. They used USB-C instead of extending Lightning.
Bluetooth headphones had been disappointing for decades. After being disappointed over and over I had settled on completely proprietary digital wireless headphones (much like wireless mice until BluetoothLE). Then Apple started making some great headphones that added a bit of "magic" around Bluetooth. I hear AirPods work great outside of Apple's ecosystem, too. They still have some of the "warts" of Bluetooth like having a battery-draining, low latency, low quality mono mode for phone/chat and a higher quality mode for music that sometimes get stuck in the wrong mode, but it's nice they're using a widely supported standard.
If Apple can fix their supply of USB-C ports so they uniformly, consistently last for more than just 6-12 months instead of some do and some don’t, I’d be onboard for switching. As it is, it is frustratingly common for Apple Lightning plugs to wear out the fingers and Apple USB-C ports to lose their “click” (even when just standing in a laptop cradle on a desk and otherwise covered with a port plug when carried around).
I have only experienced this with 3rd party cables, but never ones made by Apple.
Even Lightning cables from "alright" brands like Amazon Basics have lots of issues, whereas the only microUSB cables I've had issues with are the really bargain basement stuff that comes bundled with aliexpress junk. It seems the required tolerances for Lightning are way higher (=more expensive).
I don't have enough experience with cheap USB-C cables to make generalizations there though.
I haven't seen or heard of an issue with USB-C ports. My beefs are that there isn't enough, you can't get more with a hub, and generic power supplies and cables have only been available in the past couple years. The older devices I had with USB-C I got rid of when they fixed the keyboard. I definitely had them longer then 6-12 months.
This is a feature. If the metal inside the port wore out instead repairs would be a lot more expensive.
I’ve also only experienced lightning plug wear with cheap Amazon Basics or gas-station cables. The Apple lightning cables have much better made plugs, but they have a different flaw: the super-thin outer cover detaches from the connector housing over time, exposing the shielding wire.
Rarely do I use a Lightning cable anymore. I bought an Apple Watch and there's nothing but an option to wirelessly charge it. Before that I would have been skeptical about the idea that Apple is not going to switch to USB-C but instead just use wireless charging. Now it seems reasonable.
PS: I had used various Bluetooth headphones before. The killer features of the AirPods Pro are their small size (I can fit the case in my coin pocket) and the ability to skip 30 seconds ahead in podcasts.
I had used various Garmin Vivofits and loved that they lasted a year on a coin battery or two. But I found that "completing my circles" on my Apple Watch was just enough gamification that I'm moving significantly more than I did before I got the watch. It does make me understand why some health care organizations give them out to members to try and get them to move more. I switched from the SE to the 6 because the SE takes 2 1/2 hours to charge instead of the 6's 1 1/2. It's still annoying to have something that requires such attention to keeping it charged and then charges so slowly. But the trade-off was worth it for me.
Why is the 30-pin connector better than a well-made micro USB connector? As a consumer, I can think of a number of advantages going with the standard USB port.
Apple's 30-pin connector was released in 2003. And was undoubtedly in development for at least a year or two before that. It served Apple for nine years until 2012. It carried audio, video, FireWire, USB, and also charged connected devices.
In the span of those nine years, USB:
- didn't have a batter charging specification until 2007
- didn't have a power delivery specification until 2012
- deprecated mini-A and mini-B in 2007
- introduced a new connector in 2007
USB has always been a mess. Apple's connectors are the stability that people should strive for, not deride.
USB-C seems more robust but it may have other issues I haven't discovered yet.
As you have proven, it is usually possible to get those parts back out of the port, which is hopefully undamaged, even though the tip of the cable broke off inside.
Yikes! Oh well at least they are protected from power surges...
It also requires a larger port than Lightning, so you can see why Apple would be okay with adding it to iPads, but not to iPhones.
Even though the connector is much wider I found it way more reliable and easier to plug in without looking at the bottom of the device. It also seems way sturdier when jamming your player into a speaker dock. You mention "well-made" cables. Micro USB is now 14 years old and I don't know of a reliable brand (maybe Anker?). I still constantly throw out cables not knowing if they're broken, not rated for use, or what.
I love standards. I don't know why it took decades to come up with a reversible connector. I've been waiting for USB-C to take off for awhile. Sadly, cable compatibility seems to be a mess (between power, speed, thunderbolt compatibility, etc).
I often had problems with USB C in my previous phone on the phone side.
Apple cables fray almost immediately.
I know of no specific reason why this should be more common with micro-USB than with other connectors, but I've only seen it happen with micro-USB in person.
The real problem is we don't bolt the ports to the chassis in most cases, we just put them on the PCB with little bracing them in the direction of applied force.
See page 40: https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/CabConn20.pdf
Then I realized that the three volts that were supplied from a pair of AA batteries was really more of a suggestion. That summer, lots of gadgets I had became "USB powered"
It's funny that you mention Bluetooth LE for mice. Audio has been stuck on classic Bluetooth due to bandwidth requirements. But that's fixed with Bluetooth 5, which gives us audio over BLE. There are a bunch of functional improvements other than low power radio. Lower latency and better pairing for instance. I think BT 5.0 headphones will be a huge improvement.
Given the timing of the release of AirPods and the development of the BT5.0 spec, I've had a theory that Apple borrowed features from BT5.0 in the case where you use AirPods with Apple products.
except ble - I think is a different and simpler protocol
I worked as a "technical expert" at apple during school (recently), and I can say this is not exactly true. The biggest problems with airpods were invariably customers trying to use them with non-Apple devices. As far as I understand, airpods are unable to update their own firmware without being paired to an Apple device. Pairing was also much, much more difficult with airpods than standard bluetooth headsets.
... except Lightning is the production version of an early rejected Type C prototype. It was rejected because external facing pins are a common and well known fault point in connector designs.
Those external pins on Lightning plug tabs are the most common failure point of their cables.
Do you have a source for this? Curious to read more about it.
Doesn't fit the "Apple is a walled garden" narrative though :p
I don't know. It has a nice ecosystem around it. Everyone has a bunch of lightning cables everywhere now. Just like the 30-pin it's not perfect, but is so widely used there's one almost everywhere you need.
Thus it leaves Huawei, ZTE, Xaiomi, Baofeng, and Samsung to make cheap and unprofitable phones.
It wants to leave Dell and HP and to make unprofitable PC's, etc.
If Apple were really to increase market share in phones and PC's they would do so at the expense of their own profits. It is much better to let the "competitors" stumble on... For instance the zombie OS Android has great value to Apple because if it didn't exist then antitrust regulators would be at Apple's throat -- Apple's real genius is getting all of these other companies to pay to keep Apple out of antitrust court.
An Android is good to talk on the phone, get SMS, and throw it out after 2 years. If it charges when you plug it into the charger 90% of the time you are doing pretty good.
In rural areas of the United States we have a system of factory constructed housing which is scaled in cost to the low cost of land.
Go into such a "trailer" (I have) and you may likely find somebody with a Amazon Fire tablet who is not really sure that it has anything to do with Amazon or that it is a Fire, etc.
It is a great piece of hardware for what it costs, you can get most of the software you want to work on it by sideloading and have better luck than Bluestacks, SHIELD and similar solutions. (No matter what they will serve up offensive ads for games you will never play.)
People say "Android Tablets are dead" but no the Fire is very viable if you want something to read PDF files on the bus and not feel bad to treat it rough because the replacement cost is so low.
>For instance the zombie OS Android has great value to Apple because if it didn't exist then antitrust regulators would be at Apple's throat
I've only had one android device remain usable significantly longer than 1 year.
True but irrelevant to the original point: Apple claims the lions share of mobile profits.
Apple is perfectly happy for their competitors to focus on raw sales numbers vs. profits. I would be too if I were them.
Another analogy - complaining you didn't win the Presidency while talking about the popular vote vs. electoral college.
I didn't know Baofeng made phones. I thought they only made radio HTs.
It does rather devalue his argument about why airpods are so good if he doesn't even understand which wireless standards are involved.
I have no experience with Airpods, but if they're good it's because of two things:
Apple actually invests in the time and effort needed for a good end to end system. From RF and antenna design all the way up to user facing software.
They control the whole stack. Basically every line of code, and every gate in every chip involve in that end to end link. That means that proper development can achieve the best possible result.
This however is a great write-up showing how the wireless connectivity that powers AirPods might be turned into a platform in the future, if Apple wants to broaden its tech rather than keep it as a competitive advantage.
More podcasts, more Spotify, more YouTube/Netflix on the phone rather than through AirPlay / Chromecast, and more Siri.
Now if only more of Siri was processed on device (which is slowly but surely happening), I can see AirPods+Siri becoming a “platform”.
I’m sure Apple does use submarine ads, just don’t think this is an example.
It also helps A LOT that I never have any issues with the Bluetooth (not previously true with non-AirPods I had used, and given up on).
I'm also ok with the current touch interface on AirPods. However, I wish Apple would let me fully remap the buttons to any keyboard key or keyword-shortcut instead of just "start/stop music", "next song", "transparency/noise cancelation". Specifically, I want the AirPod controls to easily skip ahead during podcasts (15-30 seconds), unmute or mute in Zoom/Slack/etc, and volume controls.
Ideally, this sort of flexibility will be how Apple turns AirPods into a "platform".
You should instead think of “new platform” in the context of the mouse. It offered a significantly different user experience. We just happened to call that platform “Graphical User Interface” it could have easily been called “the mouse platform” in its early days and made perfect sense.
Its not ideal to call AirPods a platform, but lend the writer some poetic license, what they are describing doesn’t currently have a canonical phrase in the zeitgeist.
I'd argue that, until proven otherwise, you probably should.
> it's a new kind of peripheral, or a new interaction paradigm that unlocks new things.
Look you're right! No doubt about that. The only problem with your mental model is that it is limiting, rather than expanding.
Even if they are wrong to call it a "platform", using wording that evokes an "expanding mental model" has benefits.
I'll give you an example of where your thinking might cause "limitation". Specifically the iPhone. In 2007 when touch screen was added to a phone, Apple could have left everything else about a phone the same i.e. "touch is just a new interaction paradigm". Basically a Palm Pilot without the AppStore or a Browser. However, they realized "touch isn't just a new interaction paradigm, its a whole new enabler/platform of <stuff not previously possible>, lets push to create that and see what happens."
People might be very wrong that personalized-audio, as a new interaction paradigm, will lead to a new enabler/platform of <stuff not previously possible>. But just because it might be wrong or not lead any where, doest mean we should discourage it's pursuit.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I [1] https://www.npr.org/2021/03/12/976337203/useful-delusions-ex...
If « the industry » (whatever it means) thinks that the future of computing is to have computers everywhere, either they have lost hindsight of the reality or they are going to try dangerously hard to push this dystopian future.
Every previous computing paradigms were accompanied with some annoyance but also with significant gains for the humanity.
Where is the gain to anyone to have computers « everywhere » ? What real problems does this paradigm solves ?
It's hard because we've barely made progress in every other facet of technological progress except computing. Our systems are fragile and not future proof. We haven't learned. We've gone from discovering the secrets of the natural world and modelling it to internet connected toasters in less than a century.
This is called decline.
Basic science is still going on. True, the US isn't as good at funding it as we used to be, but it hasn't stopped, and I doubt it ever will.
More importantly, the fact that we're making "internet connected toasters" (and various other experimental gadgets of questionable practical utility) does absolutely nothing to detract from the fact that we are still "discovering the secrets of the natural world".
There are a lot of people in the world. There's plenty of room for some to be doing amazing science while others make weird gadgets, no matter what you or I think of those gadgets.
It’s a sign of technical immaturity. A Cambrian explosion of precarious innovation is standard for any new technology of any import (you can look back merely a couple of centuries to see the same in steam engines, trains, bridges, bicycles, automobiles, aircraft, pharmaceuticals...).
Be excited to live through one such!
You can find some answers by asking people how they use their smart speakers or watch.
With the watch did you consider that the fall alert monitor can call for help? Or how the heart rate monitor can detect abnormalities that should be checked out?
None of this might interest you, but surely you can see how some people find it valuable.
I think the industry will push for smart everything, and I think it'll all be met with the increasing distrust and derision which has come from the realization that everything that has a computer is basically spying on you for someone else. If there's hope in this dystopic vision, it surely lies with the open source smartphone platform movements and reasonably egalitarian bodies like the EU pushing for consumer rights and standards.
Apple could sell W1 or W2. But they will have to provide firmware update ( as they do now to AirPod ) to third party which Apple will definitely not provide the source code. And since Apple does not own or understand third party implementation of their design it makes debugging and quality control of MFi literally impossible. ( They tried that with HomeKit )
And with that, the whole point of the article was moot.
Lightning and the iPod dock connected are the only ones that are proprietary. But from all accounts Apple is planning to get rid of the port altogether, which would leave Bluetooth as the audio connector of choice.
There are other players who can make great products like good quality headphones, with standardized components, because they care about product. Although not common behaviour, it means that it can be done. So I think that most manufacturers just don't care enough, probably because most people don't care either :-(
There's the slight problem of having no practial way of knowing which set of headphones will work properly; even most reviews skip these crucial details and just talk about the "warm sound" etc.
If the headsets were marked with things like "kinda works as long as you hold it right", "works ok as long as you have a Samsung phone", "works flawlessly when paired with both your phone and your computer at the same time" at the time of purchase, I'm pretty sure people would let it affect their choice.
That's one of the benefits of staying within your ecosystem of choice; if it doesn't work properly Samsung or Apple can't blame it on someone else - it's their problem to fix.
You cannot set up a HomePod without an iCloud account (over and above an Apple ID).
You cannot install even free apps on iOS without an Apple ID, which requires a telephone number.
It is indeed about control and the acquisition of identified user behavior data. Apple has growth targets to hit and only so much can be done via hardware sales. Services revenue doesn't grow automatically without deep, intense data on a user's habits.
What's the proposed mechanism here? How do you believe Apple is using "identified user behavior data" to grow services revenue? Since, unlike their major competitors, they don't actually do targeted advertising.
But really, for most lay people it is better, safer and convenient to just use Apple selected method - to connect everything with one account/Apple ID. And I think that *primary reason* is better product for users. Overall it is easier to control user experience if you tightly control whole platform.
I am not sure if it could be even possible to create broad and well integrated platform similar to what Apple has now, with general opennes. Is there an example of this in any other tech domain?
Counter-example: Linux desktop is nice, functional, very open but so complicated and fragmented ... and it never took off and it is staying as a niche among desktops so far.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/r...
There's no way Apple is going to distribute that software to third parties, and even if they did there's no way they would be able to guarantee the quality and compliance of all of that on third party platforms. Apple is all about user experience and buggy flakey third party systems in the W1/H1 ecosystem is absolutely off the table.
The way to do this is for third parties to come together and come up with open standards for automatic pairing and seamless device handoff. The problem with that is I suspect it's incredibly hard.
FireWire never made it bug because they were too draconian in licensing. Ditto on their HomeKit certification: they ended up relaxing their security chip requirements to get even the low level of adoption they have today. They were arguably the primary enabler/driver of USB, SCSI, and the Sony rigid “floppy” but they did not initiate any of those.
Also their M.O. is to dominate profit share not market share. This doesn’t always require them to commoditization their compliment; often they basically ignore it.
Ours don’t, the microphone went early on. It takes some fiddling to get them to connect to the intended phone and sometimes the left ear is has to be put in and taken out 3-4 times to get sound. My wife and I almost always use our wired lightning earphones in preference to the AirPods. We are both still resentful that our nice ordinary headphones no longer plug into our phones. The only reason we stick with apple at this point is the better privacy