USB-C for Lightning iPhones
obsoless.com
obsoless.com
(Relatedly, back in 2017 eric migicovsky of pebble tried to make a usb-c iPhone case that also charged airpods: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/581404323/podcase-batte... )
Reminds me of when Android phones used to do the same with analog audio jacks.
I built one into a dock in my car that charged the phone and delivered audio to my car radio.
They earned their reputation when new phones came packaged with the adapter for the first few generations (circa iPhone 7/8?) after the 3.5 mm jack was removed.
Or in my case I've got an audio receiver with flaky Bluetooth. Guess it's "my fault" for not replacing it with an Apple TV, better yet Homepods.
* - supposedly the Sony xperia pro (2020) might be the rare exception to this rule.
It's similarly easier to buy a wide range of different case designs for apple.
That said, I have seen some fairly cool cases for Android devices, so I assume that some case companies support just the big sellers.
This works with my Beats headphones and is very useful.
I mean, I thought I would. I really did. I was VERY salty about their loss. But then I tried the OG Airpods, and then the Pros with ANC, and they were honestly better than any "casual" buds I'd used before that depended on wires.
Still, I harrumphed, wireless can't possibly compete with Real Proper Headphones, or so I thought.
Then I tried the AirPods Max a friend had. I was honestly stunned. I bought a pair, and then compared them directly to a similarly priced set of Sennheisers that I have that require a headphone amp to really shine.
The fancy wired rig probably does sound a LITTLE bit better than the Maxes do, but the logistical cost of the cabling is such that I call it a win for wireless, absolutely. In fact, we recently moved house, and as part of the pre-move purge I gave away the Sennheisers and the little amp. I just wasn't using them.
There's definitely contexts where a wire probably still makes sense. I'm given to believe that latency can be a problem for musical recording, for example, and so those folks still use wired phones. But for me? Yeah, it's wireless all the way now.
(When I say the move is recent, I mean REALLY recent -- like, we're still working around boxes. It sure would be nice to figure out which of the remaining boxes has those Airpods in it.)
Now, what you miss is around $1000, for hardware that will likely fail faster than any wired alternative.
That's the part that pissed off so many people. Apple obsoleted good quality headphones to sell their high margin products. Airpods are decent, but it is a cash grab.
My phone (Galaxy XCover 7) has a headphone jack by the way, and I use it. Not very often, but I sometimes plug my gaming headset to it, or sometimes an AUX jack. And by the way, it also has a removable battery and it is IP68, for those who think that it makes waterproofing impossible.
No issue with battery so far.
Pretty good going, in my experience.
But the killer is the ANC. Bollocks to public transport without it.
Only the lightning to usb3 camera adapter used them
And the speed you should actually expect from USB 2.0 is more like 35MB/s so that's even easier for flash to handle.
Nowadays I can fully saturate the 480 mbit.
https://superuser.com/questions/317217/whats-the-maximum-spe...
...which still gives ~2h as the amount of time taken to transfer 256GB. My suspicion for the slowdown (to around 8MB/s?) is the flash controller is doing read retries and applying ECC to compensate for retention failures.
But it was an interesting data point to me. It's utterly ridiculous how long Apple devices take to do migrations now.
Apple switched a year before required, and not coincidentally, ten years after promising that Lightning would be the connector “for the next decade” so as to reduce fears from those who were angry about being “forced” to replace their 30-pin peripherals.
I don’t know why tech enthusiasts tend toward conspiratorial thinking, but certainly if Apple had obsoleted Lightning after only 8 years, many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding class action lawsuits over such a greedy deceit.
Let’s not forget the very same year they stopped including the charging brick they started including USB-C to lightning cables in the box, so that their supposedly environmentally friendly practice forced their users to buy a new brick unless they saved previous cables. Why didn’t they switch to USB-C back then? To make users do another transition a few short years later?
They’re aren’t exactly a company with a track record of maintaining standards for the convenience and backward compatibility for their customers. This idea that they kept lightning around to maintain legacy standards doesn’t really track with the rest of their behavior.
They have a 20+ year old reputation for abruptly dropping and replacing ports.
The designs are finalized years in advance. Apple would have made the choice to ship USB-C before the EU mandate was even proposed.
If an individual hacker can change the lightning port to USB-C in the phone (this really happened) then Apple can definitely make the design change within a short timeframe like a month.
There are countries which put pressure on removing both the charger and the cable with regulations related to e-waste. France I believe requires a product to be available for purchase without a charger. Ironically, Apple at least used to bundle EarPods with the iPhone in France due to some electromagnetic radiation regulation.
Maybe I'm missing something here but how does a transition from having a charging brick to not having one relate to the transition on the other end of the cable going from one port to another?
The status quo is that I have an iPhone with the included USB-A 5W charger. On the other end is a lightning connector.
Next iPhone comes out and Apple stops including the charging brick, but the included cable is now USB-C to lightning.
So I can’t keep the brick that I already own and actually use the new cable that Apple includes in the box. If I want to sell my phone with all accessories then I’m left with a cable and nothing to plug it into. If I want to keep using my old cable and brick I now have a spare USB-C to lighting cable that does nothing for me.
Basically Apple created a situation that doesn’t really make sense for any hypothetical user. Someone somewhere is buying a new brick or cable or has an extra wasted cable because of it.
> many of these same people would be professing outrage and demanding
As you may have guessed I'm pretty critical of Apple (despite giving them a ton of money) but I'd classify the above critics as idiots (and given the media loves a story like that, a lot of that outrage is entirely made up for clicks). To the extent Apple cares what anyone thinks (and I doubt they do), they surely know that any decision they make will be attacked by this type of knee-jerk silliness.
Media: Apple keeping their proprietary Lightning connector for MFi revenue reasons and because they don't want to be compatible or make it easier to switch to Android.
Also Media: Apple forcing everyone to switch from Lightning to USB to force them to buy all new expensive accessories! Greed!
I can plug it up to my iPhone 16 Pro Max using the same standard USB cord. With a phone, it can only power the display up to 50% brightness by itself. If I plug power into the second USB C port, it will show the display up to 100% and charge my phone.
Having USB C also means I can use a standard USB C to HDMI cord for TVs and use the same cord for my computer. Not to mention all of the other standard USB protocols like audio, mass storage, Ethernet, etc. that just work.
It's basically a wired AirPlay adapter. That's why they cost so much.
Plugging a SD card reader to one's phone instead of pulling out the laptop to push the images to the cloud for instance. You do it once, and will be immediately convince of the advantages.
If I were 10 years younger I'd probably leap on a new phone to pick up USB-C, but (a) Apple replaced my Lightning-based iPhone 14 Pro at like the last possible moment of warranty, so right now I have essentially a new phone and (b) there's still so many OTHER Lightning or USB-Micro holdouts in our house that USB-C Nirvana is years away.
(E.G., Lightning on 2 sets of regular Airpods plus my Maxes as well as our phones; Micro on both our Kindles, my espresso scale, my camera's battery charger, and a ton of cycling gadgets.)
I like the texture very much and all-in-all it seems like a great case. The textured buttons and the wide island are very nice touches :)
The way I hold the phone in my right hand does make the connector-corner dig into my palm, which is not very comfortable. I'll see how well I can adapt.
Also the top piece has veeery slight warping which makes some seams not as seamless but does not impact functionality. I know it's a hand-made product so that's fine to me, just a reality check on what to expect.
The clasp of the top piece also seems a bit flimsy and even with the adjustments mentioned in the video I worry if it will break at some point.
Yeah, it was way above my paygrade. But I'd speculate the video's p'n'p was in the low-$xx,xxx range.
I remember when a different startup (that began inside a barn) moved from its first few h.sqft location into a proper industrial-zoned k.sqft facility. I remember when that place got its first short-schoolbus-sized Haas CnC... then got its second!
Now its had hundreds of employees (I was employee #2, non-co-founder, in this memory). I have wired in several p'n'place machines there and even the current model isn't as nice as in the video's =D
I don't know how many he sold, what his production capacity is, and what margin he makes, but I recon he could definitely make his investments work from the sales of the cases alone. And even if it does not, then there are also future products that this equipment enables. So a good investment if you ask me.
I see Lightning as fragile on both sides of the connection, since the port has springy bits that can wear, and the cables also die, either due to the DRM chips Apple involves in the mix for profit reasons, or due to the pins becoming damaged (perhaps this? https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-ligh... ).
Lightning doesn't have that failure mode. Also Lightning ports only use 8 pins (except on the early iPad Pros), so reversing the cable can often overcome issues with corroded contacts. That workaround isn't possible with USB-C.
Usb 3 might be trickier, but then iPhone lightning doesn't have that anyway.
The tab in the USB-C port makes the port more durable since it moves the sensitive springy parts to the cable(s) which are easily replaced.
Quality control matters, Apple is arguably quite good at it. USB-C is more wild-west so if you're prone to buying cheap crap you'll be worse off.
Though I still had to replace cables because the cable itself developed a break somewhere, even with one that had proper stress relief at the ends.
Meanwhile most of the USB C ports on my Lenovo laptop from 2022 are barely working because somewhere along the line either the soldering broke or the port got too loose. Possibly from too much torque but I’m not sure. So the cable has to be at just the right angle. I’ve also done some android phone battery/screen replacement for friends, and had to do a few USB-C ports when it was possible due to the same sort of thing.
However all that is pretty much moot now, thanks to wireless charging and magnetic attachment docks. As such the only time I connect a cable anymore is monthly for cleaning out photos and other data. Previously I’d be connecting cables several times a day to charge in between fields as the battery went to shit. Honestly the “MagSafe” concept is the only change I’ve seen to smart phones in the past decade that I actually really like.
Lightning has 1.5mm of height in the slot, debris has to be pretty large to get stuck and usually it's enough to just blow some compressed air into the slot to get dirt to release.
In contrast, USB-C has only 0.7mm between the tab and the respective "other" side, so debris can get trapped much much more easily, and the tab is often very flimsy, in addition to virtually everyone sans Apple not supporting the connector housing properly with the main device housing.
Having everything be lightning makes sense too, but is infeasible. Lightning was never going to be good for almost all devices, like usb mini-b, micro-b, and now usb-c have managed to get to.
I don’t care about charging speeds or data transfer speeds. When it is done, it’s done. Until then I will find something else to do or use it while charging.
They are very easy to use and have a satisfying snap when the cord connects.
My only issue with them is that we were recently at Great Sand Dunes National Park and my phone fell into the sand. The magnetic adapter was covered with sand (which wasn't too hard to clean) and very smart metallic bits that stick to the magnet. They were difficult and annoying to remove and prevented the adapter from connecting.
I guess on the plus side they protected the original port. I was able to remove the magnetic adapters and charge the phone with classic USB C.
I guess I do have two issues. The adapter on my MBP is very particular about the cable I use. And the adapter, that supports high speed data transfer and charging, appears to be directional. Although the plug seems to be symmetric, in practice it doesn't work on both sides.
I’d welcome correction. Certainly if those features are there they don’t feel the same. Lightning has a very satisfying snick.
https://superuser.com/questions/1577898/how-does-the-retaini...
Also, some good USB-C cables have a very similar click to Lightning, including Apple's own USB-C cables. Lightning and USB-C are essentially the same design, except USB-C adds an automotive-style shroud around the male side.
Lightning has a perfect mechanical design. The pins phone-side are nearly possible to damage because they're well supported and only poke out in a bump shape that can't hook on anything. The cable side is the same way - no pins to catch on anything. The port is easy to clean out. The cable end is trivial to clean. The retention mechanism doesn't rely on anything that can wear out or break.
Meanwhile the USB-C connector puts a fucking thin wedge of plastic in the middle of the connector and even worse, there are pins around that center thin wedge and they're easily broken/damaged because they have no protection whatsoever and poor mechanical support. Oh, and the retention mechanism sucks just like it has in every
The USB-C port on my airpods is contactly getting fucked up while once in a blue moon I need to tick a toothpick in and rummage around a little to get some lint out of my phone's Lightning plug, and it's good for a couple more months...and that thing lives in my pocket, whereas the Airpod case spends most of its life sitting around on tables.
It's also a substantial plus that Apple tightly controls the cable spec. Just go look at the pages where people document USB-C cables that are so shitty they'll destroy the electronics in one or both devices.
Though I'm also not sure how the MFi situation is with those generations of iPhones, and what restrictions Apple has built in to the OS. I haven't worked with MFi for a while, and I don't know for sure if MFi chips are even required anymore for that generation of lightning devices, or whether the author has incorporated one.
EDIT: I just saw this on his website:
> Any other accessory that requires power from the phone is not compatible.
So no, USB-C to headphone adapters won't work, they need power.
Probably for people like me, where the only Apple hardware I own and use is a iPhone 12 Mini, almost everything else is USB-C or the previous USB iterations. It'd be great if I can use the same cables I use for everything else with my phone too.
Having to carry one able less while travelling is also nice. Currently I carry a USB-C cable for headphones, would be nice to re-use that for the phone too.
Likewise, I hate that USB-A is still everywhere and I cannot use it without carrying yet one more cable. Sometimes I have it, sometimes I don't.
It will be a nicer material while much cheaper too.