Apple to limit USB-C charging and data speeds for cables without MFI: Leak | Hacker News Reader

Apple to limit USB-C charging and data speeds for cables without MFI: Leak

forbes.com

35 pointsinstagraham26 comments

I hope there are provisions in the EU law for not following the spirit of it? It seems incredulous that Apple will allow you to hook up any of their iPads and MacBooks with any sort of USB-C cable, but are seemingly going to limit iPhones to MFi certified ones. A MacBook will charge at 100W while an iPhone is what, 35W on some of them, 20W on the others? Also, limiting transfer speeds is just ridiculous as well. If a janky cable is going to be dangerous, it's going to be on the charging side of things, not from transferring data at USB-3 speeds.

I agree, although power is also quite well managed in USB PD since both devices know what is supposed to come in, the cheapest chip that I found from TI[0] has:

> Integrated reverse current protection, undervoltage protection, overvoltage protection, and slew rate control for both 20-V/5-A power paths when configured to Sink

> Integrated undervoltage protection, overvoltage protection, and current limiting for inrush current protection for both 20-V/5-A power paths when configured to Source

Unless they really cheaped out on the charging chip there should be no reason to restrict it.

[0]: https://www.ti.com/product/TPS25750#features

>the cheapest chip that I found from TI[0] has:

>Unless they really cheaped out on the charging chip there should be no reason to restrict it.

I'm not an expert on semiconductor market segments, but it's possible that TI occupies the high end segment, so even their cheapest chips are feature packed. Therefore whatever the cheapest chips they put out isn't really a lower bound in terms of quality. You could still have random chip makers from china that make even worse chips.

True, you can probably get worse chips for s better price from somewhere but these aren't particularly expensive for the devices Apple makes.

surely it would run foul of advertising standards.

if its advertised as usb 3 compliant, then it should be.

instead its just mfi compliant, which isnt usb.

I just want to remind everyone about the Nintendo Switch USB-C fiasco: https://www.destructoid.com/after-the-mass-bricked-switch-si...

The bricking turned out to be one third-party dock that broke the standard and put 12V on a data line. Wasn’t as big as it seemed to be.

Hey, why my phone is charging so slow? Because you have a stupid Apple phone.

Nobody is going to search out why. His Android is charging fast, but my Apple is not. So Apple has a problem. It is same like BSOD on Windows. It does not matter that random driver caused it, Windows got BSOD => Microsoft is to blame.

This might be true for any other brand but Apple. Their marketing is second to none, that extends to their users understanding their products and capabilities extremely well. The cable will tell you it charges slowly because it’s not certified. It’s not something anyone has to “search out why”.

This is just a repost of a blog post discussed on HN last week. And it's not clear if that blog post was even correct: it's quite likely that the poster confused the USB C e-marker with the MFI program and chips.

Not that Apple might not put some restrictions in place -- there is plenty of opportunity -- but on the power side there's no win for them beyond defending against dangerous power supplies.

How much of a problem are dangerous power supplies likely to be?

Could be a big one: these days you can ask for (or a PS can just try to push) as much as 240W. And there are tons of frightening teardowns of dodgy power supplies available online.

I can imagine Apple treating any non-e-marked cable as a 3 Amp cable and requesting old USB 2 power. And attempting to clamp or refuse anything outside that (though your phone still could get mighty hot in the process!)

Presumably the win would be to sell licensed products.

Can we just all agree for like, five minutes, that Apple probably has not decided that making peanuts on certification of licensed cables is worth aggravating the customer base of the product responsible for the lion’s share of their revenue and profits?

Even if this rumor ends up being true, surely we can agree there’s at least a plausibly defensible business case to be made here.

Peanuts? They make 4$ in pure profit per cable. That means billions.

Apple reported $65.78Bn in revenue from iPhone sales in Q4 2022. Their entire “wearable / home / accessories” revenue was $13.5Bn. That includes the wildly successful Apple Watch as well as the HomePod and Apple TV. All of which sell for hundreds of dollars. That’s to say nothing of first-party accessories like cables that Apple sells directly and makes 100% of the revenue on.

Third parties would have to sell ~200 MFi-licensed cables for every single disgruntled iPhone user who jumps ship for Android or decides to sit out an upgrade cycle. It’s even worse if you factor in the halo of other purchases people make after buying a new phone.

You are absolutely out of your mind if you think Apple has any desire to cannibalize iPhone sales for $4 of licensing revenue on third-party cables. This isn’t even a rounding error in Apple’s quarterly financials.

It would not be unreasonable to say that cables might make up $1B of that $13.5B - and given how stupidly profitable this scheme is, it's definitely not a "rounding error." A billion dollars is a billion dollars.

Okay, so let’s agree for the sake of argument that cables make up $1bn of Apple revenue.

What share of that is MFi cables in general? And what share of that is hypothetical MFi USB-C cables? At $4 a pop, you’re talking 125 million licensed third-party USB-C cables. Per quarter. That seems like an absurdly high number to me given the fact that most people will buy first-party cables. And hell, most people I know still use USB-A to Lightning cables to charge their phones at excruciatingly slow speeds. But sure. Fine. Half a billion licensed third party USB-C cables per year. Half a billion in revenue over a holiday quarter.

To put some share of your $200Bn/yr cash cow at risk? Plus risking the downstream halo purchases of other highly-profitable products in the ecosystem, including first-party cables?

You. Are. Out. Of. Your. Mind.

If this rumor is true, there’s undoubtedly a plausible business reason. Cannibalizing their most popular product to make pocket change on licensing fees does not even pass a basic smell test.

MFi if reading comments first:

> For those unaware of MFi, it stands for ‘Made For iPhone/iPod/iPad” and is Apple’s official licensing program for accessories for those devices. Royalties associated with MFi certification are not made public, but were previously reported to cost as much as $4 per connector. This is why MFi-licensed accessories cost significantly more than their unlicensed counterparts.

Huh, 14 comments in and no one telling me why this is actually good for me yet. Is the mirage finally wearing off?

Ok, I'll bite.

I rarely buy a cable and the $30 charger at the store I'm already in is cheaper and easier than hunting for a deal or checking that the cable on Amazon is actually trustworthy. Apple certifying the cables for their devices? Sounds good to me.

USB-C is open...for people to mess up. LTT has a good series where they test HDMI cables and quite a number are just crap. https://linustechtips.com/topic/1387053-i-spent-a-thousand-d...

Why is being USB-C being open conflated with “now every idiot and his mother will start making USB-C cables”? Couldn’t a consumer buy a cable from a reputed brand like Anker, Apple or Samsung and be done with it?

I can never understand the weird stockholder syndrome of Apple users justifying its anti-consumer business practices in the name of convenience and standardisation.

Wow, this is like a playground bully making up their own rules. This was the whole point of adopting a standard...even their Mac's & iPads don't do this BS. Definitely looking forward to a anticompetitive lawsuit

Either Apple is being childish, or they simply cannot meet a standard that someone else have created.

Not supporting USB PD will run afoul of the EU standard. I wonder what the bureaucracy will think of it.

Current Apple chargers and iPhones support USB-PD. The phones only fast charge properly with MFI. This is literally looks more like they swapped the connector and did no other changes. Also, from my reading of the common charger directive, this doesn't breach the rules.

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