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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Would it have helped consumers when the EU was trying to force the micro USB standard which was worse than Lightning in every way?

What happens when a company wants to come up with a better charging method then USB C?

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> which was worse than Lightning in every way?

You mean the proprietary connector that Apple would rather have die than turn into a free standard? Which it had over a decade to accomplish between the EU announcing its intention to enforce a standard and actually writing the law.

> What happens when a company wants to come up with a better charging method then USB C?

There is a renewal period of five years for the connection standard of choice. Why does this question get repeated every time USB comes up?

Because apple stans want to make it clear they drank the koolaid. They wasted so much money it's very important for them to feel like it was the right choice.

Yeah it's funny how many HNers come out of the woodworks to defend their favorite corporation's inferior proprietary charging standard that hasn't seen mass adoption beyond one single company and even that moved away from it on some of its higher end products.

This is why we can't have nice things.

What higher end products did Apple move away from it on? Macs never had proprietary connectors again to my knowledge once they dropped FireWire (which technically was an open standard iirc). Apple dropped lightning from iPads but I think that has less to do with moving away and more that iPad volume is relatively small, MFI is not as important in its product segment, it requires high charging rates that lightning probably can’t support, iPad/Mac convergence is a thing and they want to make the charging story between those two compelling (eg connecting your iPhone to your iPad to charge). I seriously doubt Apple dropped iPad because it wants to move away from lightning.

Also, Apple has easily shipped many billions of units with lightning connectors and dominates the profit margin of selling a smart phone. I think that qualifies as “mass adoption” regardless and they very intentionally control the lightning standard. I’m sure there’s many competitors who would haven chosen it over usbc before it became so ubiquitous if they could.

Macs never had proprietary connectors again to my knowledge once they dropped FireWire (which technically was an open standard iirc).

More than "technically."

Lots of devices had FireWire connections. In addition to my PowerBook, my Comcast cable box, my external archive drives from multiple brands, and my Sony camera had FireWire connectors. Many high-end televisions had them, too.

The notion that FireWire was an Apple-only thing is little more than a HN cliche.

FireWire (aka IEEE-1394) was an open standard but implementors were charged substantial per-unit patent royalties by MPEG-LA.

This likely a major reason why it lost out to the royalty-free USB, despite technical advantages.

$1 per port was not “substantial”,

https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...

That's pretty big, especially if you're selling an external hard drive with two FireWire ports (for daisy chaining). I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price.

I don't recall what FireWire drive prices were ~15 years ago, but that could easily be several percent of the final retail price.

$2 for two ports would have been a tiny percent of the final retail price 15 years ago.

Today we're used to portable 4GB drives for $99. But back then, drives were more expensive.

According to the Wayback Machine†, a 1TB FireWire drive was almost $400. So those two ports would have been ½% of the retail price.

† https://web.archive.org/web/20080128203022/http://www.lacie....

How familiar are you with how manufacturing works? A BOM (bill of materials)/COG (cost of goods) cost !== the retail price. You have things like NRE costs (i.e. what it costs to pay people to design and bring the thing to mass production, machines you have to buy/manufacture to support your assembly lines, marketing, legal, etc etc) and profit margins to factor in. Apple's 20-30% is rare and PC margins are closer to 2-5% (often even negative for Android phone manufacturers as they try to recoup that through revenue sharing on the software side with Google).

Basically, BOM/COG is things you pay for that you pass on directly to the consumer. However, the retail price has to cover a bunch more than that so you can't compare the two directly. A good rule of thumb is ~2-20x markup depending on the profit margin you are targeting.

A $2 licensing fee in the BOM is thus probably closer to ~$14-40 retail. Considering how thin profit margins are, 3% of retail going to nothing but marketing is not nothing especially considering that Apple doesn't have to pay this fee and also getting a cut of every product you sell to boot. Think about it this way - frequently towards the end of the development cycle as you're heading towards mass manufacturing, companies will look to shave tens of dollars and be trying to find 10-20c here & there to add up to that. $3 is massive.

You see similar dynamics with MFI. It requires a special chip (space within the product, battery costs) and licensing fees (Apple gets a cut of every sale you make making your competitor product more expensive or less profitable). It's why none of the major tech companies have MFI in their products AFAIK. It cripples any competitor product you try to make (not to mention that you're further at Apple's whims around licensing agreements changing if you build your product around MFI).

And why should people who choose to be in an ecosystem that doesn’t suffer from those market conditions be forced to use a substandard component?

I’m not saying that USB C is inferior. But if Apple did want to come up with a better port it couldn’t.

This goes back to when Apple was moving to Lightning, the EU wanted to mandate micro USB.

The first link I could find for contemporary prices was this one from 2012 - in pounds.

https://www.theregister.com/Print/2012/03/14/ten_firewire_ha...

Firewire drives in 2002 were a minimum of $400 and generally closer to $1000 for 10GB range.

Licensing fees were $1 for historical legal reasons per SKU, for the first unit sold, and then 14 cents for each subsequent unit.

Still stupid, but nothing like what a lot of this thread is condemning.

.07 percent is not remotely close to "several" percent

We old people remember $5000 for first generation IBM PC.

So get off my lawn ;)

Can you source the 14 cents per subsequent unit? Every article I found has Apple charging $1 / port (e.g. [1]). There was also apparently a 50k upfront fee to get the technical documentation. Also, since Apple was the primary PC with a Firewire interface (modulo Sony using it in their cameras & thus putting it in their own laptops), the overall market to cell Firewire-enabled accessories was quite small, which artificially inflated the price. If this was a more common standard, you'd see the licensing fee becoming a larger and larger problem and Apple was small enough then that vendors just avoided getting fully locked into Apple's ecosystem (whereas with iPhone the market is just too compelling to avoid this for most players).

[1] https://www.cnet.com/culture/apple-licensing-firewire-for-a-...

FireWire wasn’t “Apple’s” standard. There were nine companies in the patent pool and Apple wasn’t even the largest one - Sony was.

$1 cogs per port is indeed substantial.

And this is why people who care enough to afford higher end products shouldn’t be burden by commodity product vendors like PC makers and Android manufacturers.

FireWire was better. Apple and high end PCs had them. If Apple created a better connector than USB C that cost more to include, it would never be accepted by Android manufacturers who want to sell shitty $60 phones.

Exactly. Margin control is the main thing. People who don’t think burning an extra 1% of your ASP on something that doesn’t dramatically move the needle isn’t a massive negative have never built products.

Apple and high end PCs had them.

Even Apple's consumer-grade basic computers had them. I was introduced to FireWire when my wife bought a MacBook in 2006.

But even those cost more than cheap PCs at the time.

>The notion that FireWire was an Apple-only thing is little more than a HN cliche.

Nobody on this thread claimed this, so I don't know why you have to make up your own straw man and start a fame war. Famebait is against HN rules.

I had both a Sony desktop and a high end Dell in 2011 that had FireWire

You do know that Apple was a major contributor to the USB C standard?

Would other companies really use Lightning even if it were a standard? Did PC manufacturers embrace FireWire even though it was better? Sony did and Dell did on their high end computers.

> Did PC manufacturers embrace FireWire even though it was better?

For a time they seemed to, I had FireWire ports even on computers at the lower end of the price range. What I didn't have where FireWire based gadgets and going by Wikipedia that isn't surprising. FireWire style peer networking seems to force a lot of complexity onto peripherals, with every device being equal. USB on the other hand pushed most of the complexity to the host, making peripherals cheap and easy to implement. Given that I am not surprised that USB pushed firewire out, especially when after it came out that most FireWire implementations had significant security flaws.

FireWire on ThinkPads, too... Even one of my low-end TPs (but still a real one, my R61i) has IEEE-1394 (ie, FireWire).

> What happens when a company wants to come up with a better charging method then USB C?

Bottom line: it won’t happen in Europe.

Neither will any AI innovations if another proposed regulation comes into affect. AI based companies just won’t do business in the EU.

> AI based companies just won’t do business in the EU

They probably will. It’s a huge and lucrative economic bloc. But they won’t be started there, or if they are, will be stunted by the fixed costs of compliance. For all the problems with our political process, America is good about exempting start-ups and small businesses from certain regulation.

OpenAI: "Hold my coat" takes seat in meeting room with Congress to help them draft some handy new laws

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