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Comment by rgoulter | Hacker News Reader

> [USB-C is a connector] literally designed to break just like every USB connector before it.

Do you have any evidence USB-C is literally designed to break? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me.

The USB-c male connector is deliberately designed to break so that if you stress a plugged in setup you'll break the cable instead of the connector soldered into your phone, which is harder to repair. Maybe they misinterpreted that?

Notably, Lightning is designed to do the opposite. Whoops, the 1 cent connector broke, time for a new iPhone.

What do you mean? How can the connector in the phone break when it’s just a hole?

USB mini/micro B ports can break off the PC board when they’re not anchored solidly.

This was a flaw on the Nokia N900. Or at least, on some of the devices.

I solved the issue by using TOPK magnetic cables. The magnet would remain in the port (microUSB, lightning, or USB-C, not sure about miniUSB but I got like one device which uses that), and all the cables would work with it. I even leave them connected (the LED does not draw much power and I got solar anyway) which allows me to quickly start or stop charging a device. Which, given I got quite a few, is very useful. Another issue is I keep getting leftover microUSB but need more and more USB-C for which the feature isn't very important (the more USB-C I'd have, the easier it'd be to stop using magnetic cables).

The exception is my MBP as it has a MagSafe (v3, my wife's MBP and my old MBP having v2) but I forgive Apple for that; its very useful and probably where TOPK got their inspiration from.

According to another comment, there are springs that wear out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36927409

I’ve had lots of USB mini/micro B ports do this on various devices (not C so far). I’ve never even heard of it happening to a Lightning port, and I’ve been through a lot of iDevices over the past decade.

It’s not the connector that physically breaks, it’s the spring-y part that holds the cable tight. In lightning ports, that part is on the female side, while in USB-C it is on the easier to replace male side.

With that said, it’s not a common problem in my personal experience of using previously used iphones daily for another 2 years.

Micro-USB had the opposite problem: all the wear would go to the female socket - i.e. the part you had to fix with a soldering iron. It's possible that they're just not aware that USB-IF fixed this design flaw.

Interesting, TIL. I guess it's not perfect, I had to replace the USB-C port on a phone after the center post got ripped out.

It seems conspiratorial but consider that the companies making the standards and manufacturing the cables have an incentive to get people to buy as many cables as possible and to do so regularly. It’s the same complaint that people leverage against Apple normally - that Apple designs their Lightning cables to be fragile so that people are forced to replace them. I don’t think there’s actually strong evidence for either argument. I have USB cables that I’ve had for years and then I’ve had cables that I had for a few months that went bad or were poorly made. I’ve mostly had good luck with my Apple cables and never had a problem with chargers or headphones like some.

They don't. But they're "so tired of people ..."

It is very difficult to damage a lightning port by sticking something into it because the contacts are deep inside the port and only the tiniest bit is exposed, enough to mate with the plug, and the male plug has zero moving or bending parts:

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/8059819/ve...

In fact, it's remarkably easy to clean a Lightning port and the common advice is "just stick a toothpick in." There's almost no risk of damaging the pins inside. It's also very easy to inspect for debris.

Meanwhile with USB-C, you have a very, very thin piece of plastic in the center with contacts on either side, coming out very close to the face of the connector, so you end up with shit like this happening:

https://hackaday.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/hadimg_usbc_...

Further, the retention mechanism for Lightning is incredibly simple and durable. A large clip that snaps, either side, into large detents on either side:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/6wSwQD...

On USB-C they do something kinda sorta similar, but instead of being around the outside of the connector and thus nice and beefy (and protected - there's no way to bend or deform the ends), it's tiny little prongs inside the connector, completely unsupported mechanically and exposed to being bent by debris in either connector, or something being jammed inside.

Further: look at the plugs and connectors. The male lightning connector? Really it just needs to be the right thickness and the pads need to be in the right places. The female connector is similarly very simple. The retention mechanism is also very obviously low-tolerance.

Look at the design of the USB-C connector and imagine the long list of tolerances needed to get it to work right because you have the entire working guts of the device-side connector in the center of said connector going into the plug.

The lightning connector has one major flaw: the springs are in the phone side.

Over time these wear out which is why its much better to have the phone side have simple static contact surfaces and the spring loaded contacts on the cable side which is much cheaper to replace.

USB until C also did this wrong and C fixed that mistake.

I have had at least a dozen Lightning devices and I have never had the springs wear out. I’ve never even heard of this happening.

In fact, if those springs are steel and properly designed to prevent unexpected loads, they physically can’t ever wear out.

Springs will always wear out. Every connector has a number of rated insertions. Some are as low as tens of cycles only (like the 12HVPWR connector on GPUs), USB-A has 1500, USB-C 10,000 precisely because of this inversion.

For Lightning it's not known because it's a proprietary standard but it will have a number of mating cycles.

Yep, here's a picture describing the issue [1]

[1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/how-often-do-the-lightn...

Anecdotal, but I've had to resort to charge my MacBook Pro and my iPad with my Switch's USB-C cable because the other 2 broke/stopped working.

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