Oh and RIP 13 Mini, you'll be my phone until I can't use it anymore I suppose.
Though to put this in a realistic context, I am curious what percentage of iPhones have ever, over their usage lifespan, made a data connection over USB. I suspect that percentage is low single-digit percentages, and -- again speculating -- I would wager they are almost always by users with the pro models.
Is it lame that it's USB 2.0? Yes. Will it matter at all for the overwhelming majority of users? Not in the slightest.
And the raspberry pi has USB 3.0 for god's sake! It's not a matter of a dedicated processor block on the chip.
<english is a second language to me, this is intended as humourous, not aggressive>
However the lack of USB 3 IO on the existing chip from last year is a very real limitation. The Raspberry Pi 4 supports USB 3 via a separate host controller (the VL805) communicated with over PCI-e, given that the core SoC doesn't have the IO blocks...basically the same deal. That VL805 by itself is almost the size of the A16. Now of course Apple could make a USB 3 host controller dramatically smaller, but then they'd have a new SoC.
Yes it is. It’s just rare for any modern SoC to leave out an XHCI controller, which the Pi and countless others have in their SoC. Apple was an outlier
For that matter, neither does the BCM2711 on the RPi4. It leans on an external chip -- almost as large as it -- for USB 3.0 functionality.
First year, I tried to transfer data via USB.
After I accepted that Apple hates me personally and does not want me to transfer any of my voice memos, photos, or videos, or documents, or files via USB (I don't have a macbook), you are indeed correct and I'm one of those people who does not make a data connection via USB to my iPhone. But while stat is true, as with all such stats, devil is in the details :).
Actually, you're exactly the person they love. Just enough annoyance to consider a macbook and iCloud.
Airdrop works well for sharing files to other people's iOS devices, but I'd argue SMB is actually better for my use case. Airdrop sends files to a Mac's Downloads folder. SMB transferred files go exactly where I want them on the first try. The difference is just a couple extra taps in the 'Share' modal.
Though I must admit this isn't a solution for everyone. I doubt many iPhone users have a NAS stood up at home and would be happy to spend money on the 'simpler' solution of purchasing turnkey products and services from Apple.
The exception to this -- and there are exceptions -- tend to be "pro" users. If you're actually using the iPhone for video production in any way, USB 2.0 is a brutal limitation, and has long been a noted annoyance when you're transferring massive video files. Lucky for those people they'll be Pro buyers and will enjoy USB 3 (and maybe WiFi 6E? Not sure if this was delivered).
THIS is a trick question.
It's actually a security vulnerability to do so, I'm very cautious to never click trust and I wish there was a setting to disable USB (data) entirely.
When that dialog pops up which asks if you want to "trust" the connected device, saying yes creates a token which is exchanged between the phone and the host and stored on the host. That token has special privileged with iOS and can exfiltrate some data from the phone without user interaction (this has become more and more minimal over the years, with the original iPhone as I recall it could literally take a full backup like from iTunes -- and there wasn't even a prompt on the phone to allow that). That token can also be exfiltrated from your computer and inserted into special boxes made by companies like NSO which have in the past utilize proprietary exploits to basically privilege escalate that minimal access and exfiltrate data from locked iPhones.
I sound like a conspiracy theorist and I should probably just delete this.
I wish I had been warned so I could have grabbed one before it was gone.
Can't buy an unlocked phone from a carrier. Only other authorized resellers either don't sell phones (B&H, Adorama, Staples), have a limited selection which is in-store only (Target, Walmart), which leaves only Best Buy and right now I see everything on backorder. Now that Apple isn't taking new orders there's a good chance those will be cancelled.
And then there's the roulette wheel of buying from Amazon or Newegg where you might get a refurbished phone advertised as "new" if it isn't a literal brick in a box.
Still comes down to my fault for being slow to act. I said I wished for a warning but you know what they say about wishes.
(For context of how slow I am, I'd be upgrading from a SE (2016))
I wonder if they had a lot of 13 Pro purchases after they discounted it last year, which they felt could have been 14 Pro purchases.
Just like with some car manufacturers, if you want e.g. increased safety or radar cruise control, you also need $10k of leather seats and sunroofs; by removing previous Pro models, Apple basically adds a massive price premium to the zoom lens.
As this is honestly the only thing I would need from a new phone, my wife and I stay on our iPhone XR year after year. I just can't pay $1500CAD merely to get more optical zoom than my existing phone :-/
The main downside instead of buying a lightning cable that always work we now have to decipher the 10 minor variations of USB-C's various speeds/power now with zero consistency in naming schemes or amazon titles.
Also from other commenters say Apple implemented USB 2.0, so you don't have to care about type of USB-C cable you're buying - these are for advanced features which as it seems are not present in iPhone 15.