Apple's Scary Fast event could spell the end of its Lightning port | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Scary Fast event could spell the end of its Lightning port

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23 pointsCharlesW63 comments

If they update all the accessories, there are still devices they sell which don't have USB-C for charging, although they are not the "latest" models. Not that it isn't impressive, but I'm guessing it will take years for some of these to be retired.

* https://www.apple.com/ipad-10.2/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/iphone-13/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/iphone-14/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/iphone-se/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/airpods-max/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/airpods-2nd-generation/specs/

* https://www.apple.com/airpods-3rd-generation/specs/ (comes in both Lightning and USB-C)

I think that covers it. Honestly, not bad :-)

The mouse (cue the "harpooned" joke here) and trackpad both use it as well, so those would need a new revision as well.

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMMP3AM/A/magic-trackpad-...

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMMQ3AM/A/magic-mouse-bla...

None of those ‘in the know’ have forecasted it, but I’m still hoping it is Apple rebooting their Wi-Fi hardware - I’m still running an old AirPort Time Capsule at home because it is so reliable and easy to use, but it is long in the tooth. I’d say the odds are not zero they are getting back in the Wi-Fi game!

I miss things like Time Machine. I feel like computers had a lot more whimsy when we relied more on metaphors.

Good news: Time Machine still works great! I'm using it with the cheapest QNAP NAS you can buy.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423

I feel like they missed an opportunity with eero; that would have been a good way to refresh the airport brand.

> I’m still running an old AirPort Time Capsule at home because it is so reliable and easy to use

It was easy to use, as long as you had an Apple or Windows device at hand. Unlike nearly every other WiFi hardware, it didn't have a web interface for configuration; you had to use a desktop application to configure it.

Local Time Machine backups for iOS would be amazing!

Apple could sell some Time Capsules, and users could back up to USB-C drives in a pinch as well. (Why on earth do I need to sync to a laptop that has less storage than my phone?!)

But I doubt it will ever happen – charging for iCloud storage by the gigabyte at pretty disappointing rates is way too lucrative.

I never really understood why the accessories were Lightning in the first place. They're intended to be Mac peripherals; if you can charge your Mac, you should be able to juice up your accessories with the same cable. It feels like USB-C was only used for Thunderbolt, and Lightning was pushed even places where it wasn't beneficial.

It also wasn't the end of the world, though. I use my Magic Trackpad plugged-in most of the time, so I just carry the Lightning cable as a dedicated connector. It's still bizarre and annoying though, the sooner they settle on USB-C the better.

Some of their design/business decisions have always struck me as odd for a company that tries to present as unified, designer, futuristic, sleek, easy-to-use. They should have committed whole hog to Thunderbolt imo. It's honestly even more embarrassing for them to have waited this long to phase out Lightning (and that it required massive legal action). USB-C came out NINE YEARS AGO.

Is USB-D on the horizon at this point

Happily, no. USB-C refers to the physical connector, and we’re done with physical connector changes for a few years.

Puns aside, is there a next generation speculative standard being designed already? A la 6G, HTTP/3, etc.

My guess is that USB-C/Thunderbolt ports will gradually become a niche “pro” feature, replaced on most consumer devices with UWB. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-wideband

Well I think we are actually done for more than a few years. Legislation mandating USB-C will lead to stagnation there. Who is going to bother creating a new physical connector design?

I say this as a fan of USB-C and Apple changing it so that we have USB-C on devices. Though I’m perplexed as to why they added HDMI and SD card slots back on the Mac instead of maintaining USB-C everywhere. That was a bit of a disappointment as now I have to hope a dongle is available and have to plan for connectivity versus USB-C everywhere.

Sigh

I completely agree - having four Thunderbolt ports was amazing, and I'm sad that one of them has become a dedicated HDMI port. I like the SD card slot, though, but even then I'd rather have four Thunderbolt ports than three Thunderbolt, HDMI, and an SD card slot.

Absolutely. The HDMI port on the 2021 models doesn’t even support 4K60 at 10 bit (HDR); the USB-C/TB/DisplayPort ports can supply much more.

They could have fit two in the space of the HDMI port!

At least on the 2023 models the native HDMI port can do something that’s not possible using adapters yet (i.e. output HDMI VRR, which is somewhat important if Apple really wants to make gaming on macOS a thing).

EU legislation previously mandated micro USB on phones. That didn't seem to kill innovation, we still got USB-C. The only thing it killed was every manufacturer using a different bad connector. I don't see any downsides.

Apple was an exception and this feels different to me. Everybody and everything is standardizing on USB-C.

If you don’t see any potential downsides you aren’t looking hard enough. And this comes from someone who has wanted USB-C for a long time.

> Apple was an exception and this feels different to me.

They were an exception because they already had the bestselling smartphone at the time they switched away from the 30-pin connector. Apple could have put a DC barrel-jack as the main power connector and the market would have no choice but to adopt it. They seized the opportunity to create a functionally-identical protocol to USB and encumber it with a licensed connector for personal gain. Regardless of how you feel about the connectors at the time, this was not a serious alternative to USB.

> Everybody and everything is standardizing on USB-C.

Yeah, I wonder which company was known/hated for pushing USB-C early-on as a connection standard yet not fully adopting it themselves.

> If you don’t see any potential downsides you aren’t looking hard enough.

No, if you don't see the problem with the status-quo then you're being blinded by baseless loyalty.

From a regulatory perspective, the situation is this; public utilities cannot converge on a serial specification as long as the iPhone uses Lightning. So, they have to weigh the benefits and downsides to the scenario. Apple's connector is more physically advanced, but also license-encumbered and genuinely impossible to standardize a-la USB. Apple made no attempt to formalize Lightning under USB-IF. Their horse isn't even on the racetrack.

If you consider Lightning's value to be greater than the overall harm of converging on a USB standard, then you should lobby Apple to make it an open spec and remove MFi in favor of USB class-compliance. Until that point, it will be deservedly remembered by history as a petty attempt to push unwanted IP on customers who would otherwise have no choice in the matter.

> Legislation mandating USB-C will lead to stagnation there.

Really? What more do we need out of current USB-C specifications that isn't covered in the Thunderbolt spec? That's ~240w of power at max (iirc) and more data throughput than your CPU can shake a stick at.

If you're suggesting that someone creates a new connector to replace USB-C, they can still do that. They just have to do it through USB-IF and ensure that it's a community effort, not a competitive one. Commodity hardware should not ship with licensed serial/data connector hardware in 2023.

> Though I’m perplexed as to why they added HDMI and SD card slots back on the Mac

My guess is that Thunderbolt requires a lot of throughput, and if you're not using Intel IO controllers it's hard to guarantee it. AMD has also struggled in this department, despite shipping arguably more advanced CPUs for a while now. It wouldn't surprise me if the original M1 was only specced for 2-3 lanes of TB4, and went with lower-bandwidth connectors to put the extra capacity to use.

> Really? What more do we need out of current USB-C specifications that isn't covered in the Thunderbolt spec?

Idk. Ask me in a few years.

That's not a wrong answer. It's just the same one that we've been asking since like 2014, and answering by saying "well here's a newer Thunderbolt spec..."

I'm not really sure if novel connection redesigns are going to ever be a necessity in this product category.

> Legislation mandating USB-C will lead to stagnation there.

I certainly hope so.

Not to mention that Lightning is slow as hell, and can't even deliver the throughput that the 30-pin port could.

The 30-pin port also only has USB 2.0 in terms of digital connections, no?

Probably, but Apple re-used a bunch of the other pins for all kinds of signaling that's not USB.

And had room left over for a proper line-level audio output... heaven forbid that they'd have that today. I still use a Lightning-to-30-pin adapter that has this audio output, and it functions correctly... in that the phone's volume setting has no effect on the level coming from the line out, so you only have the volume control on the amp to deal with.

It was arguably clear at least five years ago (in 2018, when the iPad Pro got it) that they would switch iPhones to USB-C eventually. And since it was clear that they would switch anyway, they should have switched immediately. I assume it was unnecessarily delayed in order to not hurt the ego of the managers who pushed Lightning in the first place. It would have looked like an admission that Lightning had been a mistake and that they should have waited for USB type C.

I suspect it had more to do with not wanting to piss off their accessory vendors as long as they could (or selling through lightning equipment).

The cost of introducing new accessories for USB type C wasn't reduced by delaying the switch, it was just moved to a different point in time.

Their accessory vendors were just paying Apple for a license to connect to the iPhone. Switching to USB-C probably wouldn't piss them off so much as it would enable them to target a regular serial specification (and wider market).

> I never really understood why the accessories were Lightning in the first place.

Because the alternatives in 2012, when lightning was shipped, were either not reversible (USB A) or not reversible and fragile (micro USB)?

The USB C connector didn't arrive until a couple of years later.

Interestingly, both lightning and it's predecessor, the 30 pin connector, stuck around for about a decade.

Lightning predates USB-C and Mac people were much more likely to have a cable laying around for charging their iPhone that they could charge their mouse with.

But they for sure had regular USB cables around, which still would have been better than Lightning.

Define "regular USB cable".

Which ends are on this regular USB cable? micro USB? mini USB? USB-B?

I honestly have far more lightning cables lying around than I do mini USB or micro USB. I don't own many devices that use either micro or mini USB. Lightning also made sense because it was a solid connection, that did not wear out quickly, insertion and removal had no chance of damaging anything whereas I have had several mini and micro USB boards that I've created myself where I've had to replace the connectors over time.

Not to mention that for the user, Lightning was a much superior plug.

Small, very little chance to break or short a pin, and the fact that it had rounded corners meant it was always easy to get it into the slot.

The various USB connectors always give me grief at the time of plugging in. Some are worse than others (micro and mini are by far the worst of the bunch), some are ok though not great (C is ok IMO).

Lightning just didn't have much to show for being an alternative to USB. It was license-encumbered, DRM-ridden and slow as all hell up until the very end. It was a good connector when it's alternative was Micro USB, but a baffling choice for my Magic Trackpad 2 from 2015.

By now I feel like Apple realized that making USB-C iPhone-ready was easier than making the iPhone connector a serious alternative.

Micro-USB is disgraceful trash, that is true. I have no beef with the Lightning physical connector. It's the poor capabilities of the port (and Apple's lockdown of it) that hobble its usefulness.

The proliferation of USB connectors was especially pathetic after the SCSI-connector fiasco. Some people and/or organizations just don't learn.

wait till you find out that the lightning needs to be connected to apple device/charger to fully charge trackpad/keyboard.

i didn't know that, returned trackpad 2 times, because it didn't fully charge and the battery drained like in 1-2 days of use. when i found out that it needs to be "blessed by apple" source of power, i've returned all the apple peripherals that i've had, so i'm not going to participate in this stupid ass fuckery.

My first Apple peripheral cable was a SCSI cable.

Look it up, if you haven't experienced a cable that is a half-inch thick, costs a gazillion dollars, and breaks in about two months.

Before that, it was GP-IB (even worse, but not on Apple devices).

And, of course, we had wonderful old AppleTalk cables...

When I was kid, we had to walk to school, uphill, both ways, in the snow and the rain...

ADB might have been the pinnacle. I had a VGA connector AND an ADB connector on my AppleVision monitor.

Oh, yeah. Forgot about ADB. Was that the same pinout as AppleTalk, or were they just annoyingly similar?

Generally there was a printer port and a modem part, but only the printer one could do LocalTalk. Otherwise, they were both RS432 serial.

Which was annoyingly similar in name and connector to the ADB port for the keyboard and mice.

ADB has the same physical connection as S-Video.

AppleTalk is the protocol, but LocalTalk was the RS-422 implementation, and Apple's first party implmentation used different cables from ADB.

But everyone I know used LocalTalk over "PhoneNet" adapters which used cheap RJ11 phone cable and were way cheaper overall.

> Look it up, if you haven't experienced a cable that is a half-inch thick, costs a gazillion dollars, and breaks in about two months.

Change it to 'quarter-inch' and it matches my experience with modern Apple power cords.

GPIB takes me back. Labview "programming", test hardware... good times.

I really enjoyed being about 8 years old and learning SCSI usage through brute force. Figuring out I could plug both the 44MB cartridge drive and 500MB HDD simultaneously. But you’ve got to change the numbers on the back with a pokey bit and don’t forget a SCSI terminator!

There was something magical about just getting to muck with things endlessly until they worked. I miss having that seemingly infinite patience and free time.

I would say GPIB is actually a pretty amazing connection format. You can easily daisy chain them no need for a router/switch, the connection speeds were pretty amazing at the time (and are still OK today), the cables and connectors (although large) are extremely robust. All the labs I know still use cables that are >20-30y old, and people are connecting and disconnecting devices all the time.

That said I wouldn't want to use GPIB for connecting a laptop to a hard drive or anything like that.

USB-C has many modes with different pins connected for each mode. Good luck buying the right cable from anyone other than OEM

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C#USB-C_receptacle_pin_u...

What's the problem here? Every configuration listed supports 15w of power delivery and at least the same speed as Lightning. On the contrary, it's up to the OEM to decide what feature level to support with USB-C.

So, "Scary Fast" does not mean a new processor (M3), it just means Apple is switching to faster cables? :P

M3-based desktops, laptops, and maybe iPads are expected, but the author thinks there’s a strong possibility that Apple may refresh their peripherals as well.

The AppleTV remote exists. That currently uses a Lightning port.

Fairly certain the new Apple TVs come with a USB-C remote: https://www.apple.com/ca/apple-tv-4k/specs/

You guys just reminded me to recharge mine. The new silver one is USB-C. I think I have another that was lightning.

> And the latest design includes a USB-C port to quickly recharge.

https://www.apple.com/ca/shop/product/MNC73CL/A/siri-remote

It’s already been updated to a USB C version.

https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MNC73Z/A/siri-remote?f...

If by “currently” you mean the old ones they sold still exist, yes.

But by that standard there are Macs out there that “currently” use FireWire too.

Announcement of an announcement.

GOOD RIDDANCE. The Lightning port is junk, a step backward on the day of its release. The ancient 30-pin iPod connector was more technically capable than this thing, even for delivering video!

Here's the 10-year-old post by Panic that revealed just how gimped this thing is: https://blog.panic.com/the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-surp...

Start furiously downvoting, iPologists!

That post has nothing to do with the connector design. It supported high-speed transfer much before USB3 came around, and its design was better in many ways - slimmer, more secure attachment, connectors cannot get bent… USB-C is good enough but not better.

If you quote that post, you should also post the high-quality comment below the post, written by an anonymous Apple employee:

Airplay is not involved in the operation of this adapter. It is true that the kernel the adapter SoC boots is based off of XNU, but that’s where the similarities between iOS and the adapter firmware end. The firmware environment doesn’t even run launchd. There’s no shell in the image, there’s no utilities (analogous to what we used to call the “BSD Subsystem” in Mac OS X). It boots straight into a daemon designed to accept incoming data from the host device, decode that data stream, and output it through the A/V connectors. There’s a set of kernel modules that handle the low level data transfer and HDMI output, but that’s about it. I wish I could offer more details then this but I’m posting as AC for a damned good reason. The reason why this adapter exists is because Lightning is simply not capable of streaming a “raw” HDMI signal across the cable. Lightning is a serial bus. There is no clever wire multiplexing involved. Contrary to the opinions presented in this thread, we didn’t do this to screw the customer. We did this to specifically shift the complexity of the “adapter” bit into the adapter itself, leaving the host hardware free of any concerns in regards to what was hanging off the other end of the Lightning cable. If you wanted to produce a Lightning adapter that offered something like a GPIB port (don’t laugh, I know some guys doing exactly this) on the other end, then the only support you need to implement on the iDevice is in software- not hardware. The GPIB adapter contains all the relevant Lightning -> GPIB circuitry. It’s vastly the same thing with the HDMI adapter. Lightning doesn’t have anything to do with HDMI at all. Again, it’s just a high speed serial interface. Airplay uses a bunch of hardware h264 encoding technology that we’ve already got access to, so what happens here is that we use the same hardware to encode an output stream on the fly and fire it down the Lightning cable straight into the ARM SoC the guys at Panic discovered. Airplay itself (the network protocol) is NOT involved in this process. The encoded data is transferred as packetized data across the Lightning bus, where it is decoded by the ARM SoC and pushed out over HDMI. This system essentially allows us to output to any device on the planet, irregardless of the endpoint bus (HDMI, DisplayPort, and any future inventions) by simply producing the relevant adapter that plugs into the Lightning port. Since the iOS device doesn’t care about the hardware hanging off the other end, you don’t need a new iPad or iPhone when a new A/V connector hits the market. Certain people are aware that the quality could be better and others are working on it. For the time being, the quality was deemed to be suitably acceptable. Given the dynamic nature of the system (and the fact that the firmware is stored in RAM rather then ROM), updates *will* be made available as a part of future iOS updates. When this will happen I can’t say for anonymous reasons, but these concerns haven’t gone unnoticed.

It's a very informative comment, but it doesn't change the result for the end user.

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