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Comment by supreme_berry | Hacker News Reader

When I was traveling from Sharm El Sheikh through Sinai to Israel in the bus I’ve transferred 40GB of photos and videos to my friends on iPhone 6S. Imagine this on Android 5 years ago - they (Google) only managed to copy AirDrop with same functionality (wifi + bluetooh) only in 2020 with Nearby Share.

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Not sure if that's a real question, how you would have copied files 5+ years ago between phones? Support for USB host mode was introduced with Android 4, released in 2011, but would have required the use of an OTG cable so that would likely not have been an option.

Popular Android file managers at the time had file transfer capabilities so that was probably the quickest. The advantage is that they used normal file transfer protocols which were available everywhere so the other party didn't require any special support.

However a decade ago all phones had SD cards, because their internal memory storage was so small so you needed them should you wish to use the camera beyond any trivial amount. So just copying that way would probably have been what most people did.

Yes - similar story… I had to use it at airport security in south east asia when I needed my hotel booking to get through… my colleague was able to airdrop it to me even though we had no cell or wifi connectivity

Samsung phones have had this feature for years. So if you had the top of the line androids, you would have been able to do the same thing you did with your Iphones. I see many people make the mistake of comparing $1000 Iphones to the cheapest $200 android phones and use that as evidence of Iphone superiority. I guess we have Apple's marketing and brand to thank for that.

Never heard of such features on Android or Samsung despite my Android friends use them whole life and AirDrop was one of the reasons some of them switched to iPhones. There were some things where you needed to put smartphones back to back and it worked probably in one of 100 times but nothing like AirDrop. That’s why Google failed with wifi direct and other childish approaches.

And iPhones with AirDrop cost like 100 usd for 5s

> Never heard of such features on Android or Samsung

S beam used to exist in Galaxy S4, which launched in 2013. It used NFC and peer to peer wifi to transfer files at high speeds.

Why not just use a cable and copy the files? Oh wait you can't do that on an iPhone. You don't have the freedom to.

Of course you can use a cable, but they are unreliable. They tend to break, corrode, get dirty, disappear, have incomparable ends(one side USB-A, the other one micro USB, lightning - whatever) that one of the devices don't accept.

They are also bulky and the transfer speeds are slow. Airdrop can transfer gigabytes of data in minutes, which is only possible with the latest wired interfaces that only the newest devices have and not all support file transfers.

iPhones tend to last 3-5 years or even more and iPhones from different generations can transfer each other files through AirDrop. Not everyone has the money to update their phone each year and many who can update think it's wasteful to do so that they can use the latest wired file transfer method.

You recommend buying 5-10m cable and connect people on different seats in the bus/plane/pool/whatever? Which century is this?

Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!

Uh, I'm on Android ans I use Syncthing, not a câble.

" Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!"

...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket.

I would love to see this caricature of ios users, what dongle do you imagine we carry and what purpose does said dongle serve?

I was mostly thinking about Macs at the time I made the joke, because very often an iOS user is also a Mac user. Where I work, Mac users always have to carry around dongles.

I think it is the other way around -- almost always a Mac user will be an iOS user, but there are plenty of iPhone users without Macs. At least in the US. iPhones seem to be around 50%-ish of sales in recent years, while Macs are not as popular, somewhere around 15%.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/13/mac-market-share-q2-2021/

https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-iphone-record-sales-us...

Of course, there are lots of competing estimates for this sort of thing, but the numbers are so far apart that I don't think it matters too much.

Personally, I have an iPhone because I'm completely uninterested in cellphones and just want something that I don't have to think about too much/will be supported for a while. My computers all run Linux, because computers are cool, and fun to tinker with. Maybe someone who grew up in the era where cellphones weren't so useless will have a different perspective, though.

WRT dongles -- I dunno. Some of the popular Macbook models don't have HDMI ports, right? That seems pretty annoying. But my ZenBook lacks a headphone jack! The moral of the story is I guess that OEMs just want to fill our pockets with dongles. Or maybe selling replacement dongles is the solution to the post Moore's law era, since we don't have to replace our PCs anymore.

That makes sense, thanks for the info. Where I work there are lots Mac users, so the Venn diagram of iPhone users who use a PC isn't as noticeable. :D

Really depends. Our company is entirely Mac. Everything “just works” wirelessly. Like AirPlay for conference rooms, my external monitor is USB-C, etc. No dongles necessary. It’s only when going to other clients where I need to carry around dongles because they don’t support AirPlay or their Wifi network requires several days advanced notice and a urine test before you can get access.

ah I see. with regard to Macs, I skipped from the 2015 macbook model to the 2021 macbook model and I probably would have held out longer and therefore never needed a dongle, but I digress.

back to iOS. no dongles for me there either. my headphones have been wireless for almost a decade, and the charging ports are pretty ubiquitous.

“ ...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket”

No, just happy to see you

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