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Comment by nixpulvis | Hacker News Reader

I’ve been saying this for years. Sure, USB-C has better shielding and can reach higher data rates, but I use my phone cable for exactly two purposes: 1) charging, and 2) playing music.

Meanwhile, dirt and sand can get into the new USB-C cables on both sides now, and the tube design is less resilient to being stepped on or rolled over.

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I've had several lightning cables fail from moisture getting from my fingers onto the exposed contacts and causing galvanic corrosion. The tube from USB-C seems to prevent that.

Ah that explains why all my cords have a really tarnished lead.

Are you sure its a tarnished lead? Lots of lightning cables have one tarnished lead (often on each side) from arcing. If I remember correctly using such a cable in a new iPhone could even damage the matching pin inside the phone, leading to the situation where it would start arcing on a non-broken cable (damaging the same leads on the new cable).

Who grabs a cable by the metal bit?

"Your average user" does.

I have had Android phones with USB-C and other USB-C devices like iPad Pro for many years now, and "dirt and sand can get into it" never even remotely crossed my mind. And yes they have been working just fine -- current phone is 3 years old and still doing well.

Antidotal and doesn’t dismiss my claim that lightning is more durable.

Every single lightning cable I've ever owned developed a black corrosion on a pin that prevented it from working. Every. single. one. You cannot claim that lightning is durable. It's completely farcical.

Never happened to me. In my experience lightning ports a as close to unbreakable as it gets given that size factor. In contrast every USB-C port seems to get loose or outright break after heavy usage (including lenovo and MacBooks). I will not miss having multiple cables but I will miss the snug and reliable fit that various lightning plugs/ports have maintained over years in my service. It's probably time to move to wireless charging anyways

I could show you my collection of broken lightning cables where the plastic just before the "meat" of the connector is split, leading to visible copper/whatever cables. Which in turn leads to broken copper/whatever cables, which are at best broking the functionality, at worse dangerous (is it?).

Wireless stuff is neat I guess… but it takes up much more space and is much less efficient. The power loss alone seems like a big deal that we don’t really consider. Not to mention that it’s not really any more convenient than say MagSafe is. I find my phone uncharged in the morning far more often because I didn’t align it properly with the pad, than because my cable is going bad.

I will say, it’s nice letting my phone stand also charge it… so I’m also kinda a fan.

This is a surprisingly tough issue for me.

* anecdotal

I thought that looked wrong. Damnit autocorrect. Thanks.

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