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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

> It comes with one USB-C to USB-C charging cable - not sure if it is a data cable, also.

The USB-C charging cables can also carry data at USB2 speeds. I'm pretty sure thats the limit of what the iphone 15 usb-c port can handle. (Since they explicitly called out the iphone 15 pro as having hardware support for usb3).

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The people who are buying iPhone 15 don’t care about USB-C data speeds. Most people never connect a physical cable from their phone to anything but a charger.

Those people that do care are probably already getting a Pro anyway.

How do people even come up with claims like these?

Any evidence besides you just decided it?

Observation of friends, co-workers, family, and the general public?

I’m a part of general public and I agree. I’d never thought connecting my iphone to pc through a cable because it’s such pita to do so and speeds are absurd for that type of device. All connectivity goes through telegram (thanks to creators for amazing data limits, opposed to email’s 20mb no-exec nonsense).

> Most people never connect a physical cable from their phone to anything but a charger.

Carplay? Or is a cable optional for that? IIRC it was sending some data over the cable because I get promoted for carplay stuff after plugging it in.

I suspect the data transfer requirements of CarPlay can be handled by USB2

Exactly. If you look at YouTube bitrate for a 1080p video, it's 8mbps, which is 1.67% of the theoretical max data rate of USB2 (480mbps), so there's more than enough bandwidth for CarPlay.

Yeah USB3 and greater is really only needed for high res displays and faster large storage.

given that carplay has, until now, been exclusively implemented by devices that don't support USB3, that's a pretty good suspicion

CarPlay is wireless for some brands of car, wired for others.

My Prius has wired carplay (which makes the Qi charger seem absurd, although as it turns out the Qi charger doesn’t work most of the time), so I bought a $50 box that plugs into the USB port and gives me wireless carplay.

Which one did you get? I've been looking to get one recently but have heard that they're kind of a crapshoot and not very polished in UX.

I've got a Quadlock for my Audi and I'm returning it, disconnects often.

I got a generic "ATOTO" one that was on sale. I had to upgrade the firmware since there was some audio stutter after about 15 minutes, but after that it's been just as stable as wired CarPlay for me.

I just got a carlinkit 5.0 and initial impression is that it's working great with very little latency. Can't speak to long term reliability.

Should also mention I bought mine via this deal for $40

https://slickdeals.net/f/16869551-carlinkit-5-0-cpc200-2air-...

As far as "not very polished UX", after connecting it's been nothing but the standard CarPlay interface. The instructions say there's a web UI accessible via wifi where you can install updates or change configuration but I had no need to use it. Just connect with Bluetooth, wait a second, and accept the "Connect to CarPlay" popup.

This is the one I have http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0B8RKXK9R/donhosek

It’s been in use for a year with not a single issue. I set it up with my phone and have been able to forget about its existence ever since.

Since CarPlay has worked for years over Lightning cables, 2.0 speeds must be sufficient

I was in that camp, but a recent iOS update regressed bluetooth yet again (it skips sometimes in all my cars), so now I’m using the USB iPod support when possible.

This is the first time I’ve ever used data over USB on this phone though. I wish Apple had better testing for their bluetooth stack.

Audio over usb works fine at usb 2 speeds.

Hell, professional audio interfaces from major brands like RME, with full support for 16+ channels simultaneous in/out high rate audio work fine at USB 2.0 speeds.

I was arguing against having any data connection at all (and just fixing the bluetooth stack).

The only port I want at all is a headphone jack, and that’s easily waterproofed. Since we can’t have that, I was hoping they’d remove the charge port entirely.

> Most people never connect a physical cable from their phone to anything but a charger.

This is probably more typical for iOS than Android users, because the former restricts very severely what can be accessed from the connected computer; copying data is much faster via cable.

Yes, the spec sheet for the non-Pro 15 says it transfers at USB2 speed.

Considering pretty much the only use case for USB data transfer on the iphone is copying pro res video to an SSD, which can only be recorded on the pro, this seems like a good tradeoff. No point raising the cost for casual users who will never use this feature.

Hey now, many of us still load up with mp3s via iTunes. I am on a wired desktop and wireless sync does not work for this.

‘Many’ of us are using iTunes to sync mp3s?

What are you getting at here? Spotify doesn't have everything, the least of which is music I make myself.

He's saying you're an extreme edge case that's <0.01% of the population and shouldn't expect gargantuan corps to cater for your edge case as it doesn't make financial sense.

I am sick of this "extreme edge case" bullshit when there is 20+ years of historical precedent. We did not go away and this shit did not come out of nowhere. The tech is already there and its maintenance is minimal. Just because some young shits running the numbers in the bay area are obsessed with and surrounded by the latest and greatest doesn't mean the rest of the world marches to their bullshit drumbeat. Especially when we keep seeing the things we used to own turn into rentals.

Stop shitting on the long tail!

And fuckin stand up for your rights and privacy as a consumer!

When did tech become so conformist?

No, but people not satisfied with what Spotify has are like a tiny percentage of non-mainstream music listeners (whether one can point to X major artist not being on Spotify does not really change that. Even if it still didn't have the Beatles most users could not care less).

It isn't about "major artists". Fuck them, their music universally sucks. It's about underground artists, unsigned, or anyone locked out the bullshit distribution model that is shoved down artists' and the public's throats

While I don’t use iTunes anymore and don’t plug my phone in to transfer, I’ve uploaded 400+ GB of Phish to Apple, and I’m able to download and stream it just as well as the latest Taylor Swift album. If I wanted to load my phone up with the whole catalog (still thinking about doing it), I’d probably plug my phone in. But I’m also more than happy to stream those shows and download my favorites. It really is my favorite service/product Apple offers full stop!

Why do you hate capitalism? Not engaging in monthly services, consuming additional ads, or letting Apple sniff your data in the cloud.

I too am saddened by what feels like a deliberate tactic to further cripple the already locked down cable interface. On Android, I could trivially upload and download all of my data without an intermediary.

I will be a very happy person when these "capitalists" all collectively jump off a bridge

actually, in finder, you may enable “show this device on wifi” and…no more needing cables for syncing! :) … this probably is not available on windows itunes though.

Windows here, but thanks.

But it really puzzles me how that feature needs wifi. Regular TCP/IP has everything you need to discover devices on the network and connect to them. What exactly is 802.11x adding here?

Define "everything you need". Are we talking about finding out other hosts on a LAN? Or modern devices and their capabilities?

There are lots of added protocols (e.g. Bonjour) because TCP/IP alone is not about discovery.

And of course here we're talking about syncing over wi-fi. How would TCP/IP alone, without Wi-Fi enabled, cut it? It would sync wirelessly over ...cable ethernet?

All you need for discovery is broadcast access, and TCP/IP grants that. The discoverer broadcasts, "I'm looking for devices!" And the discoveree replies "Here I am!" Boom, connection is made. This is how game server browsers worked for LAN play back in the day.

Is it really so inconceivable that a phone is connected to a wi-fi gateway on a regular LAN?

Because that is how my network is set up here at home.

I would say it's referring to WiFi on the phone side, rather than the Mac/PC side. Though you can plug an Ethernet adaptor into an iPhone it's very rarely done and so most people would understand they want to sync with their phone over WiFi, as opposed to USB cable.

Apple seems to mostly use Bonjour (mDNS) for these whether using a local network (and indeed that is the case for this wifi sync feature), but they also have a few features/frameworks that can also be setup over an Apple specific "peer to peer wifi" connection which is bootstrapped with bluetooth and switches to peer to peer wifi for fast data transfer, similar but not the same protocol as WiFi direct (according to https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/12885). This is what AirPlay2 does for example. That is one way WiFi could matter for such a feature versus Ethernet.

This wifi sync definitely works with Ethernet on the Mac side (personal experience)

It is available on Windows too, in iTunes. You need to connect the cable once to enable it. I’m using this to sync my music and backup my iPhone.

Note that this can annoying make your Mac refuse to shut down because it is doing something wirelessly with your phone.

If you use Apple Music, you can upload mp3s (preferably ALAC to avoid lossy transcoding because it always converts to AAC) to their servers and stream them from any of your devices. For me it's the killer app for Apple Music. It's the reason I switched to it from Spotify.

You can find USB 5Gbps in a Pixel 6a that costs 300 USD on Amazon. USB 3 is not exactly some fancy new expensive tech.

You can get a breakout board for few bucks yourself and that's still going to be more than Apple would have to pay.

The actual answer is that they used last year's SOC which had only USB 2 support.

The port is capable, but does the Pixel actually move data that fast over it?

The max speed isn't as important as much as the fact it can go past the USB 2 limit in speed.

For determining whether it's USB 2 or not maybe (and even then it might not be so clear cut).

For actual use the actual practical max speed is far more important. It would be useless if you wanted something better than USB 2.0 and it only did 1.1 times the USB 2 limit for example.

> The port is capable, but does the Pixel actually move data that fast over it?

My girlfriend's Pixel 4a can transfer about 4x USB2's real world maximum. Just tested it.

USB 3 isn't new, it dates back to 2008. Every Pixel phone except the original Pixel 1 (USB 3.0) and Pixel 3a (USB 2.0) supports USB 3.1.

My bad, I was thinking about the Pro models' 10Gbps maximum and was looking for comparisons at that speed. I replaced what you wrote with the phone I had in my head!

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