Apple is still limiting the iPhone 16 to slow 24-year-old USB 2.0 speeds | Hacker News Reader

Apple is still limiting the iPhone 16 to slow 24-year-old USB 2.0 speeds

pcgamer.com

48 pointsmiles44 comments

Bought an iPhone 16 pro max on launch day. Went to the Apple Store with my iPhone 15 pro max, and was encouraged to transfer my data in the store. I sat there for 7 hours, with both phones connected via hard wired Ethernet, and was still not successful. The only use case I can come up with for higher speed physical is direct phone to phone data transfer during these upgrade cycles. I’m appalled by how much doesn’t work on my new phone - passwords that need to be re-established, music that needs to be downloaded. It’s not a traditionally clean “it just works” Apple experience. I’d like to plug a USB cable into both phone, and within 15min, have my new phone exactly like my old phone - exactly the same. It was so bad, I may skip future refresh cycles - and the reason Apple may thing about actually fixing the experience.

It's not as if Android offers anything either. Third party tools like syncthing can be used to backup the camera folder, but the root android folder is protected against copying because of permissions issues that Google refuses to fix. Same if you connect it to an external SSD. You have to root your phone truly be able to make a simple, complete backup. But that comes with a lot of disadvantages for financial apps, security, etc.

Last android phone I bought (my current device, got it as a refurb, ill never buy new again its a waste of money) supports high speed usbc with display and data out. Usb3.2 gen2 I think it is. I specifically chose this phone because of the high speed usb transfer rates. I use the 128gb storage for data transfer all the time and I also like being able to plug it in to usbc monitors and use it as a desktop when I need quick compute functions and don't want to lug a pc around or boot up my actual desktop.

I make sure most of my clients whenever they buy new monitors get usbc hub monitors. The price is bugger all extra and once I show them what I can do with my phone they basically want the same. Not to mention I haven't installed a laptop workstation space that isn't usb c one cable to plugin and go in about 3 years now.

If you use iCloud backups, you get that. Downloads your settings first, then restarts and download all your content. Your phone is an exact copy of what you had before minus the debit/credit cards in Wallet.

And your Google Authenticator TOTP records. Not sure if that’s changed recently, but it caught me out badly a few years ago that it didn’t save them to iCloud.

Why cable? 7 hours? All the previous iPhones I just held near each other and it transferred in like 20 mins via wifi

Unsure whether that was phone to phone or iCloud to phone but either way was entirely painless

Granted I was on both fast wifi and fast Fiber

They want you to use wireless as much as possible. Their dream is 0 physical ports. And I say this as an iPhone user and someone who generally likes using Apple products.

Too bad because wireless airdrop compresses media files.

> Too bad because wireless airdrop compresses media files.

Do you have a source for this? Even a forum thread with a few people complaining about it would be fine.

You'll need to choose, under Options, to use the "Current" format to prevent "compression".

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255765702

I don’t see any setting for current format vs compression options on iPhone.

why the hell are you using airdrop??

upload it to icloud and have icloud client in the computer sync it.. It will just show up there automagically..

That is what i do, i have not plugged an iPhone to a computer in ages.. my last three were likely never plugged at all..

Airdrop pictures and video to other people while traveling on a restricted data limit or no internet.

3GB of stuff after a day of traveling easy.

Do you constantly clear your free 5GB of iCloud storage or do you pay money to do things that should be achievable for free?

This is super tangential, but isn't secondary storage basically free now? You could look at it as a % of overall computing spend (phone, laptop, desktop, acccessories, etc) or even just price/TB historically, and either way it's a rounding error.

> Too bad because wireless airdrop compresses media files.

No, AirDrop is just byte-for-byte file transfer.

Messages does, if you've turned on "Low Quality Image Mode".

I would buy that except they’ve put in full thunderbolt 4 in the pro so they’ve got an insanely fast interconnect on that phone with the same USB-C port.

Granted, that requires a tb4 controller chip but I don’t know if that’s built into the A18 pro or not.

I wish they used wireless when viewing from computer nearby. Sort of fuse your online library with phone.

Airdrop is only ok for few photos.

Who would that benefit? Like, they have to service these devices, a cable connection is just much more reliable.

How does one get decent audio from a phone without a 3.5mm-jack? I am only half joking, and I know this is beating a dead horse. But sometimes you need to make sure the horse is really dead. If I sit with my phone and a pair of headphones with aptX adaptive it is only good if I have direct line of sight and don't move around. This is my experience with all adaptive codecs. Putting my phone in my pocket makes it noticeably worse. If you walk into a store with 2.4ghz WiFi (or too much Bluetooth interference?), suddenly your audio quality tanks even more.

My wife's airpods only supports aac256 at absolute best, meaning it sounds bad most of the time. If I sit with the phone in front of me it is more or less unnoticeable, but putting her phone in my pocket, the cymbals start sounding like splashes in a pool.

And then there is the latency. Anything above 50ms is unbearable. For some reason it works ok in English, but I almost can't watch Swedish (my mother tongue) or German content with that kind of latency.

> How does one get decent audio from a phone without a 3.5mm-jack?

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MW2Q3AM/A/

Note that the USB-C version works with PCs and Android phones as well. And for folks using iDevices with Lightning ports: https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MMX62AM/A/lightning-to-35...

The DACs in these are quite good: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...

But then there is the issue of them losing contact every time I put them in my pocket.

But yes, the dac in those is even decent compared to what you get in most usb headphones

I think more like "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler"

(for mistaken values of "as possible")

>"Maybe to save space"

You see, this is the one size fit all argument they can use when nothing else sticks properly

This is a limitation of the non Pro models. Feels a bit like the money grab Apple has going on the memory upgrades.

Yup it's the same thing with ProMotion missing on the display even though it's identical to last year's Pro model.

And iCloud is even slower than this. Around 10mbps if it’s cold archive.

I started self hosting things like that, and I am always surprised at how fast things get.

By using a USB 2.0 port.

there is a cross platform push to go all wireless a lot of the how to's that are about useing usb,then give instructions for wifi.....so.... ......just getting a new cheap wallmart android phone to plug in and transfer files to a linux box is a chore now,but once it's working it's fast and whole photo albums jump from one device to another my internet is strictly through a wifi hotspot on one phone with mass data,and then a second phone for general use and a semi broken laptop and an old hdmi screen running mint,which refuses to connect to more than one wifi thing at a time and the second phone is devoid of googlish apps and does not play nice with any web sites doing multiple redirects(etc),but it is my main camera so,usb is in constant use

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