The regular 15. And 3.0 also supports much faster charging.
Maybe most won't care, but I still think it's disgusting and pathetic for a company this size with products this expensive to cheap out by using USB 2.0.
Maybe most won't care, but I still think it's disgusting and pathetic for a company this size with products this expensive to cheap out by using USB 2.0.
Almost all the people on this forum are in the target market for the Pro. The standard iPhone is not built for us, nor will most of its users have a problem with 480Mbps-over-wire transfer speeds.
The only meaningful difference between 2.0 and 3.0 for the iPhone use-case is transfer speeds, and the simple reality is that the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners only use a cable to charge their phone, not to transfer data on/off it.
Could there have been other tradeoffs? Power consumption, silicon footprint, et cetera. Most people never use USB to transfer data to and from their phones. It would be slightly ridiculous to support 3.0 if it meant tradeoffs in anything practical just so they can say they support a new protocol.
So apple might have had USB3 speeds support in the A15 specifically for the mini, or they might have included USB3 support for a while in all SoC and enable it selectively for segmentation purposes.
That would gel with the comparison between the iPad Air 5th gen and the iPad Pro 5th gen: they both use the desktop-class M1, but the Pro supports full TB3 and USB4, while the Air only supports 10GB.
Honestly, I'd expect any Armv8.3+ or Armv9 to have USB PD/USB-C, Thunderbolt, etc. on the chip itself. USB PD is even halfway-or-more supported on some budget Cortex-M targets. Apple, though, is a special case; the chipmaker and developer are the same, so they have the freedom to say "no USB-C on mobile chips" and include only the features they want.
My post was pure speculation and a little giving them the benefit of the doubt.
So Apple is using a PCIe USB 3.0 controller for USB 3.0 iPads.
They could've easily done that on the iPhone 15, so it's market segmentation.
Adding additional chips/additional controllers is not "easily" done. The iPads have more space to spare on their boards, and have larger batteries that can absorb the additional power requirements for running those additional chips much easier.
When the non-pros get the A17 we'll see if they disable the USB3 controller and it's market seg. I'd assume so but...