Hacker News Reader

Comment by BoorishBears | Hacker News Reader

That's a great example of their point, all I got was a mechanically inferior connector (putting the most important piece of the female connector on a floating sliver of plastic was a choice) and the cable hell attached to USB C.

If USB C had been so important to me I wouldn't have bought iPhones all those years.

View on HN

You also got a connector that supports much more than USB 2.0 speeds. It also supports high power charging, video, thunderbolt, etc.

Lightning was a dead-end connector that was only kept around to keep the Made-for-iPhone moat drawbridge up.

USB-C makes the right design choice in putting the springs in the cable. Those wear out over time. I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible. But reversing this would require that the springs on the USB-C cable are on the outside, and those are quite fragile, so that sounds like a worse idea.

USB-C is mostly a good design.

> I've never seen the male part of the female USB-C break, but I'm sure it's possible

I know anecdotes don't mean anything, but I have. Every USB-C phone I've ever had, apart from my iPhone that I currently use, ended up with having completely worn out connectors after two-three years of use. They stop holding cables in firm enough and start only making the connection when holding the cable at an angle.

Could you mention what phone models were those. I haven't seen one port go bad.

They were an LG Nexus 5X, a OnePlus 3T and a Xiaomi Mi 8. The ports became loose on all of them over time, especially on the OnePlus where the cable would just fall out if you held the device upright, and in its final days the Xiaomi would need the cable pushed at an angle to make a connection.

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but have you considered that you might need to improve your putting/unplugging habits? I used to have connectors and cords break after around that much time. Around 2018 or so I bought a new set of chargers and decent quality cloth sheathed cables. Because all my cords were new, I was much more diligent about carefully plugging and unplugging (no mashing the port, no flexing across the short axis, no yanking by the cord) and eventually a habit formed. Not a single one of those cords, nor any of the ports on my phones, have broken since then. Even the daily use ones next to my bed!

I treat my phones carefully, I've literally never cracked a screen on any of them, the same goes for handling the charging cable and port. I'm always quite gentle with it, never leaving it propped up by the cable or at a weird angle, and the cables I used were the original ones that came with my devices. Mainly because my phones spend a lot of time plugged in acting as a hotspot for half a week, so I try to minimize the harm I cause by the extra (un)plug events.

The Lightning port iPhone that I used for 3 years however handled my usage just fine (just tried it now and it feels just like it did new), and the USB-C one I've had for half a year seems to be holding up fine as well. These I used with a mix of cheap Aliexpress cables and the genuine Apple ones.

I don't understand this logic. If lightning connector had less issues than USB-C how could it the users fault for not being careful. This exactly how engineers/developers answer to problems they cause with bad engineering/design choices. Anyone that gives feedback is blamed. It leads to terrible engineering decisions like the USB standard, which frankly has always been bloated and terrible because of its design by committee. As much I would love a standard connection port for all my phones I won't accept substandard engineering. That's why I am still holding onto my lighting connector devices even though on principle I disagree with using them.

Who gets to decide that I have to treat my devices that I pay for like fragile glass vases.

I do both QA and Development and pretty competent at both. I almost never make broken things or poorly thought out because I know this negative feedback loop will continually make the situation worse. Lack of empathy for people that use products just leads to issues like Windows taskbar not even being able to search for applications. Its all the same thought process that leads to the result.

A good option here is to use MagSafe for charging. I don't think I've ever plugged anything into the USB-C port on my iPhone.

Probably a lot of lint in there! My 4 year old phone gets that way until I clean it out with a plastic pick (very vigorously at that) and it's like new again.

Lint was only ever an issue with my Lightning connector iPhone. Unfortunately it wasn't the issue with the USB-C phones, the ports were just worn out.

Would that USB 2.0 Type-C were somehow outlawed, or even better that every device that used Type-C supported everything it can do.

You don't want that. I was organizing my cables and noticed how much thicker the USB3 cables are than USB2. USB2 cables are cheaper than USB3 cables, the latter have gotten cheaper but still buy two USB2 for some USB3. USB3 cables are also shorter cause harder to transmit signal, this has also gotten better.

The flaw is that USB-IF didn't require marking faster cables. Putting a blue ring, stripe, or dot would have solved the problem.

USB-C is decent for data transfer. It's pretty poor for power delivery: the pins are too close, so it's not rated for use in bathrooms or kitchens, and there are many more of them than needed for power delivery, making it relatively expensive to use in things like children's toys.

It was a mistake to conflate flexible power delivery and data transfer, you rarely need both at the same time. It's possible to design a better and cheaper 3 or 4 pin power delivery standard that can use higher power. But the law now says USB-C and good luck ever changing that.

USB is a bus that is intended to be universal for serial *data*, that is what it is designed for.

1. The law doesn't mandate USB-C in particular, the port can change without the law changing

2. Nobody was going to add a second port for charging when USB can handle fast charging already. And if you need to charge in a damp environment then use wireless.

3. I'm pretty sure you can add a second port and the EU law doesn't mind at all

And assuming USB 2.0, how much cheaper do you expect a simpler port to be?

Apple was on the design committee for USB-C, they also failed to make lightning an industry standard after 10+ years. The EU didn't design the connector, they just required the industry pick a design, and USB-C is what Apple and the rest designed.

I have tried to explain this so many times to people. You could just scrape out the lint from the lighting port with a tooth pick. The fragile part was the easily replaceable cable. Now the fragile part is in the iPhone itself.

Lightning had the contact springs in the phone, USB-C has the contact springs on the cable. This is the part that wears out, and USB-C moving to the cable is an improvement.

Throughout its life, Lightning suffered from "black pin plague" where when springs in the port wore out, the power pin would start arcing. Now you have a cable with poor connectivity on the power pin, and you use this cable in another Apple device and it starts arcing on that device as well, causing that device to start transmitting this disease. It was a terrible design and USB-C does not have it.

https://ioshacker.com/iphone/why-the-fourth-pin-on-your-ligh...

Putting spring on the connector part rather than socket part means the easily replaceable part has wear item. Lighting is designed wrong here.

And our helpdesk had more broken lightning connectors than anything else in shop that's ~ 50/50 PC/Mac

I’m surprised to hear that it was such a common failure. I used plenty of lighting devices back in their hay day and plenty of USBC devices since they became common. I don’t tend to treat those devices gingerly and have far more issues with USBC than I ever did with Lightning, even accounting for the fact that lots of devices have USBC but only phones and mp3 players had lightning.

If Lightning is so important to you then you can still use Lightning-based iPhones. Nobody took away the hardware they sold you, they just mandated that the new ones adopt a common standard.

If lightning was vastly superior, they could still have a lightning port in addition to the usb, or make a different version with their propietary port for the rest of the world. But it wasn't superior.

I understand the added difficulty of making a version with a different port. Again, if it was Uber superior, it would have made for very good advertisemebt for apple.

Apple can't even make their strain relief on their cables work properly due to "being ugly" so preferring them to USBC is just another case of Apple-juice-kool-aid

it's ridiculus that this is still the problem ,that's no 1 cause for dead cables for our helpdesk

Reply on news.ycombinator.com