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Comment by katmannthree | Hacker News Reader

I'd side with Apple on this one, their lightning ports seem to be far more durable than USB-C ports.

Which are also a major pain to replace in both phones and laptops due to the pin count and general construction.

I am still young, but I can remember when every friggin phone had its own charger. Going somewhere and hoping someone had a charger was literally not an option. Now thanks to the EU guideline you only have three chargers, USB-C, USB-B micro and whatever Apple does. Before every manufacturer had their own connector with their own peripherals.

And this is why Apple does it. Of they would comply with the standard they were in a situation where people had the expectation that all USB-C peripherals would work for Apple as well. Apple reduced the number of connectors on their macbooks not without reason, at first you got less PCB-space sure, but connectors are also expensive so you safe money and in the case of Apple you gain money by selling peripherals.

I never had or witnessed any issue with USB-C ports since they came out and I am working on PCBs under the microscope, people tend to come to me with their broken stuff privately and I repaired a number of USB-B micro jacks.

Even with those it rarely was the connector that failed but the PCB around it (lifted pads, broken substrate, etc). If you do something like the lockable USB-C connector mount from Neutrik I am pretty sure USB-C would win in a mechanical stress test.

I soldered USB-C connectors before (just never had to replace them yet) and they were ot weirder or harder to solder than any other current connector. And I would probably not have big troubles resoldering them of needed.

Don't know if you remember the Nokia era? Everyone had the same charger, and people used each others nokia charger all the time.

And what about the other connector at the bottom? There was power and data handled separately. I remember getting a successor Nokia phone with the physically same connector and not working in my car adapter. I also remember my Nokia headset having a different charging port diameter than my phone. Nokia failed to fully exploit the platform they had - not even considering the head-start they had on the app store front.

There were actually two different Nokia chargers, with the newer one using a smaller barrel jack. So even when living in Finland, where everyone had a Nokia or two, you'd still have some confusion since someone had the older barrel jack and someone had the newer barrel jack.

That was later on, and one of the dumber things Nokia did. People bought Nokia just for the ease of charging, then found out they had an incompatible charger nonetheless. That one burnt a lot of goodwill.

It seems Nokia never realized what power they had with their de facto market standards. They threw it all away for no reason at all.

They were also one of the few who had a chance to have a smartphone platform like android and apple. People would trust them,even if they were late to market. But their infighting made them blind to their own potential. The whole Microsoft thing at the end was just the cherry on top.

Eh, strong disagree, I had to buy one of the fuckers pretty much every six months while all my usb-c cables hold

That is because Apple cables suck. They don't do strain reduction properly (which many people tend to solve by adding it themselves using shrinkwrap or the spring of a ball pen).

Other manufacturers don't put design functionality over styling and therefore add propper strain reduction even if it looks less elegant.

My other gripe is their white cables no longer go with their hardware. They worked with the original macbooks and ipods, but with so much bead-blasted aluminum on their new devices, the white cables don't really match.

I’ve never had this issue with Anker cables.

lightning is the betamax of the 2020s

What speed is a lightning port again? Can you get HDMI uncompressed out of it?

Going by existing devices, lighting ports are capable of 4 lanes of communication and at least 5Gbps per lane.

That's easily enough for 4k at 60 Hz, if the device is set up for HDMI output. I don't think any existing devices can output through passive HDMI adapters, but it would be easy to make it possible.

Even if you were stuck with USB 3 speeds, which some existing devices can definitely do, that's still more than enough for 1080p.

If you can't get either of those, the problem isn't the port.

There are workarounds for parts of this. You can make proprietary keyed dongles that support extra pins (or even just signaling compatibility) that can support hdmi out.

> I'd side with Apple on this one, their lightning ports seem to be far more durable than USB-C ports.

You know that they ship USB-C ports on their laptops right?

It's bizarre that they use USB-C to charge their laptops now, their magnet chargers were much nicer and if you have your laptop in a bag you'll likely have a charger with you so a custom charger is no big deal.

I think the magnet charger was a bit thicker, which would explain the change.

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