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Comment by daft_pink | Hacker News Reader

No one cares. Most people don't use the USB cable to transfer to their iPhone anyways, because it automatically backs up to iCloud every day wirelessly, and there really isn't any reason to transfer data to an iPhone via cable.

The few random people who do are probably videographers looking to transfer their large video files and buying the pro models anyways.

Even android users probably aren't paying attention to what speed their USB was.

I'm shocked that is even a selling point. I've been using an iPhone and iPad for about 8 years and never transferred data this way. I've only used usb for midi or keyboard inputs where data speed was not a factor.

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I'm really curious about the reason why they did it though? Is it a significantly cheaper chipset or something? Apple, in general, has favored high throughput I/O in their devices (scsi, firewire, lightning port). The only rationale I can think of is that they felt they needed one more point of differentiation to boost the pro models.

They’re reusing the previous SoC from last years Pro phones which were still USB 2.0 Lightning. The announced Pro phones have 3.0.

USB-2 is integrated into the A16 SoC - not USB3.

USB3 / USB 4 was enabled with an external chip in select iPads. This has a power, space, and material cost. It may not even fit in the phone space or power budget at all.

For the A17, they added USB3 to the SoC. I bet the iPhone 16 non pro will have USB3, when it gets the a17 chip.

We’ll see. Per an other user, the iPad Air is capable of full usb4 / TB but is software locked to 10Gb for segmentation, so that’s hardly unimaginable. Especially if they consider modern transfer speeds to be related to direct ProRes streaming.

Maybe, I’d like to see some sources that the chip is actually the same as what they use in the pro iPads.

It also could be heat related in the iPad Air, it has a thinner and lighter chassis with less metal. Thunderbolt uses a fair bit of power at 40Gb/s! Let alone say, providing 15w of power to whatever device like an external SSD.

> Maybe, I’d like to see some sources that the chip is actually the same as what they use in the pro iPads.

https://www.apple.com/ipad/compare/?modelList=ipad-pro-12-9-...

Scroll to the "chip" section, and straight from the horse's mouth they both use a 4+4 / 8 M1, I rather doubt Apple has a variant of that chip which removes ip blocks (AFAIK the only variant is the 4+4 / 7 chip still available on the super low end MBA).

> It also could be heat related in the iPad Air

That... does not in any way affect the point?

Can the M1 do thunderbolt without any other chip? That’s not clear on the spec sheet, you’d need a teardown.

> That... does not in any way affect the point?

Okay…you’re right, the only reason I don’t have a 128 core epyc cpu in my iPad is market segmentation! Darn markets.

> Can the M1 do thunderbolt without any other chip?

Yes. Per Apple:

> More Innovative Technologies Packed into M1

> An Apple-designed Thunderbolt controller with support for USB 4, transfer speeds up to 40Gbps, and compatibility with more peripherals than ever.

> you’d need a teardown.

You mean like the dozens of teardowns of M1 macs when it was released, which only found retimers on the motherboard but no external controller?

> Okay…you’re right, the only reason I don’t have a 128 core epyc cpu in my iPad is market segmentation! Darn markets.

I see you are wilfully obtuse and entirely unserious. I'm sorry I bothered.

> You mean like the dozens of teardowns of M1 macs when it was released, which only found retimers on the motherboard but no external controller?

Thanks for the info!

> I see you are wilfully obtuse and entirely unserious. I'm sorry I bothered.

No, you are being an asshole and a bit of idiot. I said it might be heat related - so there is a reason beyond market segmentation that apple does not include thunderbolt in the iPad air. I don't know why I am bothering either, but here we are.

Source?

One thing that a lot of people are missing is that the iPhone 15 Pro is using the "A17 Pro" SoC. It'll be interesting to see if the base iPhone 16 will also have the Pro SoC or if they'll be using a non-Pro version.

Will the non-Pro version also be 3nm? Will it support USB3?

Following the same pattern they’ve used for a while, the older phone will get the same A17 chip. The special high performance X/Z stuff was always for the iPad line only. I am not aware of any special “pro” only a series chip.

But when you need it for that random 1-off thing, you’ll be cursing out Apple for how slow it is. Like this one time I had to transfer over air-drop to a Mac and it took hours because their Mac was too old to transfer via wire from my iPhone. Like wtaf.

Edit to add. Their Mac didn’t have usb-c ports and that’s the only charger I had with me and no adapter. They were an Android user.

> you’ll be cursing out Apple for how slow it is.

Is it though? Really? 480 Mb/s is quite fast for most applications, especially those involving a smartphone.

Any user with files large enough that this transfer is ostensibly slow is a videographer of some sort and has likely bought the pro model or at least planned for this event.

What sort of file is a "random 1-off thing" that a casual user might need to transfer, unexpectedly, over the wire, which is so large that a speed of 0.48 gigabits/sec is extremely slow?

The non-pro model can transfer a 5GB file over the wire in around a minute. Again, what is the real-world use case or scenario where a non-pro, casual user would find some random 1-off file, that is so large that the 0.48 Gbps speed is lacking?

Every so often I transfer all of Wikipedia to my phone (using one of the Kiwix extracts, which are ~100gb). It takes forever (~1 hour). Until VERY recently (last few months) the Finder did not even have a progress bar for iPhone file transfers.

Personally I am very excited for this transfer to happen over USB3 in the future.

Wow, that’s an interesting (and unique) use case.

Out of curiosity, what client app do you use to actually view the snapshot on the iPhone?

The app itself is also called Kiwix: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kiwix/id997079563

The latest full snapshot (including low res images) is here and clocks in around 102gb: https://dumps.wikimedia.org/kiwix/zim/wikipedia/wikipedia_en...

I live on an RV and end up working off of solar power far from cell service, so when I run out of power for Starlink there's no internet and Kiwix is super handy for relevant reading material.

> What sort of file is a "random 1-off thing" that a casual user might need to transfer, unexpectedly, over the wire, which is so large that a speed of 0.48 gigabits/sec is extremely slow?

In my single anecdata case, out of 15ish years of owning phones, it was a 4kx60fps video of a recital and about 30gb if I recall correctly.

Also, you are doing a classic mix-up of mega-bits vs. mega-bytes. A 30 gb file transferring at 480 megabits per second takes around 5 minutes with no protocol overhead (about 20% speed reduction) and assuming the flash on the phone can keep up and isn't doing anything else on the wire (probably another 20-40% reduction in transfer speed).

Anecdata taken.

How did I mix up megabits and megabytes? I mentioned a 5 gb file transferring at the same speeds takes a minute or so. That tracks with your 30 gb:5 minute calculation.

You said Mb/s not mbps.

Okay, since we’re being pedantic, I still think you’re wrong. Mb/s is equivalent to Mbps.

It would have been different if I wrote MB/s (all caps)

MB/s = megabytes per second

Mb/s = Mbps = megabits per second.

> Megabits per second (Mbps) are units of measurement for network bandwidth and throughput. They are used to show how fast a network or internet connection is. Each Mbps represents the capacity to transfer 1 million bits each second, or roughly one small photo per second. It may also be expressed as Mbit/s or Mb/s.

Ah yeah, that's fair. I just reread my reply and realized it came across as much shorter than I intended, sorry for that. I wasn't trying to be an antfucker.

Apple does. It is costly enough to use an old controller in non pro model phones.

75MB per picture in pro raw 48MP mode. 6GB per minute with ProRes 4k video. 5 minutes of video and my data plan caps if uploaded to iCloud.

One nice addition is they allow hard drive data offloading for ProRes video and can record at 4k60.

> It is costly enough to use an old controller in non pro model phones

I don't think it's that costly to continue to use the same SoC they just used in the outgoing models.

> No one cares. Most people ...

I care. I have a legitimate use for USB 3 on my phone.

My home ISP is unreliable. It doesn't care if I'm in a time sensitive meeting. When it does go away, I need to quickly get back into my meeting.

Sometimes it goes away for hours. It has also gone away for days sometimes. I need an alternate internet connection, and preferably one that doesn't require my neighbourhood to have electricity, because that also is unreliable where I live.

So I use my phone. For short durations of use, I use the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature, but for longer durations I switch to USB Tethering.

At USB 2 speeds, I'd guess, the Ethernet connection can only negotiate a 100 Mbps link speed. That is much slower than my home ISP.

The phone I use currently has USB 3 and cost me half the price of an iPhone 15.

Sounds like the iPhone 15 isn't for you.

Of course not. It lacks even a headphone jack.

Up until a few years ago I still manually backed up my iPhone (x4) photos to my PC. The process was terrible, would fail frequently and was slow but I took my lumps because I wanted full control over my photos and wasn't ready to pay the Apple tax.

I pay the Apple tax now, and curse Apple each time they tell me my iCloud storage is almost full. I have TERABYTES of available local storage but Apple keeps my photos hostage in their shitty iCloud world.

I would gleefully go back to managing my own photos if Apple wasn't actively trying to prevent it. /rant

…just turn off optimized storage? …

You don't have to sync your photos to iCloud. No one is forcing you to. Just go to your Photos setting and disable iCloud Photos. Use your terabytes of local storage to your heart's content!

Dropbox and other cloud storage apps can do photo backups on iOS. I use dropbox

I care. I'm not a videographer, I don't use iCloud and I transfer via cable all the time.

USB-C is a major selling point for me, primarily for data transfer speeds.

Spot on! I read the article and for some reason thought that Apple has made a big mistake. You’ve reminded me that I literally never plug my iPhone in. I charge with MagSafe and transfer everything over the network.

Next iPhone should have no port!

I use MagSafe in my car and next to my bed, but I do appreciate the faster charging of a cable when my battery is low.

I do feel that the differences and selling points of these devices vs the previous devices have gotten so trivial though.

USB C is nice, but the suggestion in their presentation that I carry around a usb charger for my Apple Watch and would charge my Apple Watch from their device “directly” or that a millimeter this way or that way in width or thickness matters at all. These things are just the most trivial differences. I can’t believe I spent over an hour watching their stupid presentation.

I use my port constantly, and your use case isn't everyones.

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