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Comment by stevenpetryk | Hacker News Reader

Apple’s like “oops, sorry we made 4 billion lightning cables that don’t work with new phones now!”

Firewire cables are obsolete now too. Their right to repair and cloud locking of devices is a way more egregious waste issue.

Thanks to an EU regulation mandating type-c connectors

To be honest, Lightning was always dead in the cradle because of it's licensing fee. Apple tried to take the high road for so long, but vendors actively avoided Lightning unless they could buy bootleg, unlicensed connectors. Apple basically took a serial standard hostage, and then insisted that it was okay because they did it before USB-C was finalized. There's no way Apple didn't know from the offset that they were diverging from the standard and creating e-waste, they helped design USB-C. The creation of Lightning was an exploitation of 30-pin's depreciation.

The plethora of crappy, bootleg cables with USB-C connectors that are single purpose (power only, low-speed data only, etc) has created plenty of e-waste, in addition to confusion. I don’t see how this is an improvement over the licensing model, where you know every cable works the same.

The number of “USB-C” things I have that aren’t is infuriating. Won’t use a real charger or PD, only works with an A to C cable, only works when plugged in “right side up”, etc.

At least with Lightning and Micro-B you knew the score.

The good USB-C stuff is great. The rest is worse than B ever was.

What are they exactly? I haven't see such issue in years.

They’re not “real” computer devices but other things with charge ports. One is an air duster, for example.

I also have some credit card payment hardware that is clearly USB-B and they just swapped the port.

The computer world seems fine. It’s everyone else.

The licensed model failed. I own multiple gas-station Lighting cables with no data, only (5w) power. Ultimately everyone converges on the "fuck it, what's the cheapest thing on Amazon" mindset and licensing doesn't help.

But that's what all lightning cables are. Low power limit, low speed data only.

I can put 12w through a lighting cable. That’s fine for most if not all of their iPhones and iPads. Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

> Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

If you keep it turned off for entire day to charge then sure.

You can put 12W through all USB-C cables as well (AFAIK). The crappy ones might be limited to something between 12-50W, while decent ones allow for 100W or more.

According to DannyBee, it was Google, not Apple, that helped design the USB-C connector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30033799

I’m impressed how fast people on HN switched from “Apple is terrible for not dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” to “Apple is terrible for dropping lightning cables for USB-C!” Talk about a zero-downtime migration!

Apple is terrible for using lightning cables in the first place.

Not really. Lightning was better than micro USB-B connector, which was Lightning’s contemporary.

Lightning was the first decent phone connector. USB-C learned good lessons from it.

USB-C is still mechanically inferior. Lightning feels better to use and lasts longer. It always clicks, it’s always snug, it lasts forever. I wish Apple wasn’t so greedy and made it an open standard. Maybe now we would have better connectors on all of our devices.

Eh, having had a lightning connector snap off inside my phone, I don’t mind moving away from it.

It’s wasteful because it contains a chip to verify the cable’s fee was payed to Apple. They’re small but there are a lot of them and they are uneccessary and annoying when they fail and you can’t charge your device.

Different groups of people.

The backlash is mystifying though. MacBooks, iPads, and Beats had been shipping with USB-C for years, a standard Apple was heavily involved in creating in the first place. Most other manufacturers had already standardized on it. Unless you lived in a very strange bubble of only interacting with iPhones and air pods, you already dealt with USB-C devices. For those very few people in that very limited bubble, the problem was fixed by replacing a single cable. It was a mountain of controversy for a figurative molehill.

The point is that if Apple switched to USB-C in 2016, the same time they only put Thunderbolt ports on MacBooks, we would be looking at much fewer lightning cables. Even if as late as 2020 when almost every android phone is using USB-C, that's still better than iPhone 15 from 2023.

Don't get so excited over one guy.

Also the wording isn't clear, they might have meant the problem was how long they kept making lightning.

Lightning to USB-C adapters are a product that exists,

https://www.amazon.com/Lightning-Adapter-MacBook-Samsung-Mon...

I have a rat's nest of cables for almost any situation (as any accessory comes with a cable), but my daily drivers are just USB-C cables with adapters at the end.

Not their fault. They are forced by EU law

Reply on news.ycombinator.com