Apple's Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables | Hacker News Reader

Apple's Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables

theverge.com

24 pointsqzervaas17 comments

Semi-dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39210195.

Can someone check its charging speed please, is it quicker than USB-C or lightning?

This is just for the umbilical cord between the battery and the headset, the battery charges through a standard USB-C port.

Why will Apple hide a connector like that then? Is it a more power efficient design/connector? Is there a patent?

Nobody knows, but my guess: Apple is hiding a test of advanced battery fault detection and monitoring technologies that will eventually show up throughout their battery-powered products. Final Boss Lightning was the simplest, least risky way to support the power delivery and communication needs in the AVP Mark I timeframe.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US8986866B2/en?oq=8986866

Battery fault detection needs to be implemented entirely within the battery pack in order to be worthwhile. USB is more than sufficient for communicating information from a battery pack to a host system.

There's no need to speculate about complicated technology based on ancient patents when there's a simple and far more plausible explanation available: Obviously what this connector provides that Type C lacks is a secure latching mechanism, which is critical because there's no battery in the headset itself.

Why not just put a tiny battery in the headset, sufficient for a few minutes of use, like an LTO battery that won't just wear out?

Or add latching to USB-C?

Adding latching to USB-C would largely defeat the purpose of using a USB-C connector, because you'd be throwing away most of the compatibility that the USB-C connector could win. At that point, the USB-C connector would be there merely to check a box on the spec sheet, rather than because it's the right connector for this purpose.

As for a battery or supercap in the headset itself: by all accounts the headset without a battery is pushing the limits of what is a reasonable weight. There needs to be less stuff in the headset, not more.

There's other applications for latching USB-C, not many, because latching is often terrible, but a few.

Apple is probably big enough to convince the USB-IF to make it an official extension to the spec, if they wanted to.

But definitely not an expert, not planning on buying anything Apple or any VR anytime soon.

They don't want you to use a replacement battery they didn't sell you

Didn't work out so well with the original lightning. Knock-off cables appeared within a year.

As there was with the old 30 pin, the maglock and everything else. Apple either doesn't care or never learns.

apple doesn’t care.

with this connector, no one will be accidentally plugging the headset straight into a usbc power adapter without the battery in the loop. at least not without some third party help.

If I had to guess, one group came up with (reasonable) requirements for this connector to handle certain currents and voltages, be reliable, be nice-looking, and be proprietary for the purpose of not dealing with RMAs related to people connecting shitty usb-c batteries directly to the headset. And another group realized "hey, we have all kinds of documentation, test results and tooling, we can make a wider lightning cable with low risk and low cost. Sure, we are moving away from lightning but since this is internal to 2 apple products it doesn't matter."

Horrible article

CHODEning

> In an alternate timeline, this might have been USB-C, part of a world where external batteries for the headset are plentiful and don’t need Apple’s special approval (or is that spatial approval? Ha ha, just a little Vision Pro humor there)

Yeesh, maybe don’t try incorporating comedy into your writing anymore.

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