Apple's port, which doesn't have an up/down direction, is much easier to plug in than the micro USB port, which does. It is an innovation, like it or not, that USB doesn't have.
Annoying wireless and iffy non-Windows support join the pack.
But even so, there's no tactile difference. So cabling a phone in the dark (pretty routine at bedtime) is a crap shoot either way. I personally solve this with a bedside dock, but it's a legitimate fault.
I've had a lot of non-conforming USB stuff pass my door and it's all really really awful.
But, when taken in context of the real world, where only Apple devices have this svelte and clever and proprietary, closed, licensing-hostile connector... on balance, it fucking sucks. I would like my iPhones and iPads significantly better if they just would just grow up and use micro-USB.
Mini-USB almost got there, but due to the flaws detailed in the OP, couldn't really become The Standard. But Micro-USB did. Virtually everything uses it now. My bluetooth headsets, my wireless mouse (to charge), my Geiger counter, all my non-Apple phones and tablets, my pocket Wi-Fi terminals, my music players, my exercise gadgets, etc etc etc...
Every time I plug in an Apple device these days, I grimace and feel like I am driving this really awesomely designed car that looks great, handles great, is really comfortable... but only runs on this special gas that I can only buy at one gas station in town, that takes holidays at random.
The Lighting connector is a lot better than the gargantuan, ugly, hard to use Dock Connector of yesteryear (or even this year, if you are buying the cheap iPhone). But the time for proprietary non-standard connectors for mobile devices is past.
Im just saying for me pretty-good-and-completely-ubiquitous beats sublime-design-but-have-to-worry-about-having-the-right-cable. It is indeed easier to plug in the Lightning phone charger in pitch black darkness. But I haven't needed to do that yet in 2013.
What I have needed to do is ask a bunch of people if they happened to have an iPhone cable -- oh no, sorry, not that one, I mean the newer one, thanks anyway... no? nobody? Ok fuck it I guess I will just turn off my phone to save that last 3% for an emergency.
That wouldn't happen if I just needed a standard micro-USB cable that pretty much every non-Apple device now uses.
Alternately, buy a Mophie Juicepack. Extra battery life AND an integrated microUSB adapter.
I think the real misstep here is Mophie shipping the juicepacks for the iP5 with microUSB as power input (vs lightning), though.
These are trivial to plug in purely by feel in the dark.
And as a bonus, they charge many of my devices! I "die a little inside" every time I have to use a special cable for an iDevice (or a Samsung tablet!)
Interesting that you consider it an advantage to have a connection sturdy enough to pick up the device by the cable. You probably don't care much for magsafe adapters...
Those that think lightning connectors are just a pain in the ass haven't thought it through.
Additionally, it is one of the best physical connectors ever designed - a good choice for a reprogrammable interface that we are hopefully stuck with forever.
I would really love to see a magnetic bi-directional cable eventually for phones/tablets. The Surface one is OK, but it doesn't snap as nicely as I think it could.
Lightning is overdesigned which makes it expensive.
That's not the test of overdesigned. It's overdesigned if the cost doesn't provide sufficient benefit - and it clearly didn't.
The connector succeeded because the IPod was extremely popular and then Apple got to leverage network effects.
Really? The cost for a lightning to HDMI cable tends to fall in between that of an MHL to HDMI and a Slimport to HDMI adaptor.
Maybe that's why you're struggling to find a source that "directly confirms it".
PDMI has USB 3.0, displayport and high current power.
the ipod dock connector has firewire and composite video.
No for several reasons (and since I haven't seen a single car with wifi music built-in, I'm going to assume you're abstracting wifi/bluetooth here into wireless):
1) Wireless drains batteries and I may not have a charger
2) Wired = charge-capable, likely charging.
3) Wireless setup requires authentication and configuration, often from the car itself. My 2012 Sienna is a great vehicle that is comfy on a road trip for 7 ppl, but it's BT implementation is a godawful nightmare. Setup is required to be initiated from the car, and can only be done through voice, and when you're not driving (even by passengers). Also, it tends to "lose" configs every once in a while. Meanwhile, the USB port just plays whatever's connected to it (we use mainly iDevices, so not sure about droids) and the in-wheel controls work fine.
And in a year or so, the transition to USB3, requiring a new port, will start; Lightning will handle USB3 with a different cable.
Also, of course, most modern Android devices don't have a microUSB port; they have microUSB+MHL or +SlimPort.
Cars should never under any circumstances ever have specific apps like Spotify, Pandora, and Bing. In 15 years, people are going to feel pretty stupid about owning those. The 3.5mm TRS connector, however, is a long term open standard that will still be working long after Pandora folds.
Isn't that the point? Its shiny at the time you buy it, but it quickly feeds planned obscelescence, increasing your desire to replace it later. Win-win for the manufacturer.
Overdesigned? Really? I'm not sure; it accomplishes the same thing as MHL, Slimport et al (which also tend to be expensive) and will be able to support USB3 when the time comes. It's far more futureproof than the old 30 pin thing.
Lightning is just Apple's marketing term for Intel's Thunderbolt interface. The standard is available from Intel, and if it were not it would be more appropriate to direct your anger at Intel.
Thunderbolt is the PCI interface, Lightning is the alternate USB connector.
Just let the free market decide things like this, it is extremely efficient at that. Right now, Apple still sells loads of iPhones without using a standard connector. And frankly, I think my wife's iPhone 5 plugs in a much better way than my more standard Nokia 925 does.
Yes, it absolutely did not take an EU intervention to standardise mobile phone chargers on Micro USB, instead, the manufacturers recognised that it is a good thing to get rid off proprietary chargers as consumers all only bought the phones with the standardised chargers.
Or are you saying that needing a new, different, charger for your phone is actually a good thing™?
Anyways, if apple's solution is simply better than the android micro USB solution, who wins?
The argument that the free market will find a solution works when competition is allowed. It doesn't work when every company who isn't Apple is legally prohibited from adopting Apple's connector.
That I give Apple the power to develop innovative proprietary solutions is a choice I personally make and I want the freedom to make. Why should everyone be forced to buy Android? So the idealists don't feel bad about their standard but hard-to-use connectors?
Even Apple can't invent everything they need themselves. They would benefit from a patent-free ecosystem by being able to adopt other manufacturers' advances, just as the other manufacturers would benefit from being able to adopt Lightning.
It's impossible to prove that patents are a net win for anyone but patent lawyers.
I win, because I don’t have to buy a new charger for every phone, because I can use standard USB cables to charge my phone and because said USB cables are ridiculously cheap; allowing me to carry one cable to connect my phone, my camera and 90% of my other gadgets to my computer (the rest using eSATA).
Frankly, I don’t care whether Apple’s solution is ‘simply better’ if it is only available for Apple’s products and hence necessarily restricted to a small percentage of the overall market.
And frankly, the picture on my eTeeVee(TM) is much better than the picture on my Samsung, even though it isn't compatible with OTA or cable standards.
For example, consider the 51,000 tonnes of redundant chargers that were estimated by the GSMA to have been distributed in 2008 prior to the common charger initiative[1]. One can argue that the costs of landfill, carbon impact (est 13-22 million tonnes/yr), pollution effects etc. should be priced into the product, but the reality is that they are not.
I have no view on the iPhone connector vs uUSB, but standardization has enormous benefits for consumers and society as a whole, and typically it takes an external agency to "encourage" it.
[1] GSMA analysis from UNEP, Gartner, European Commission Integrated Product Policy Pilot on Mobile Phones, University of Southern Queensland data.
Surely many of us have drawers full of these bits and only really need one or two to keep all our devices topped up.
Not to mention the upcoming transition to USB3, which lightning will survive but current Micro-USB will not.
Finally, micro-usb ports are pretty delicate, and a common cause of phone breakage. The lightning port is far more robust.
You might not be able to send higher charges while using data - I've not followed the spec that closely - but you can supply at least enough charge to keep the phone running even if you cannot recharge it.
The reason you don't get docking stations for other phones is because every sodding phone puts their USB socket in a different place (and often it changes from model to model from the same manufacturer). This means whatever dock you build will automatically be fugly compared to iPhone/iPod docks because you'll need a USB cable. Which is why any such dock will either have a 3.5mm audio jack (TRS) and thus support any portable device, or use bluetooth for a wireless solution.
I believe there's a hack in the apple products that can be used to send more current through USB but it's not standard. I might be wrong though, it's been a while since I looked into that.
Also, it's the reason why certain devices (notably external hard drives alimented through USB) come with two USB connectors in a Y configuration to be able to leech enough current from the host. At least that's how I think it works.
The problem is when you want the 'device' to power the 'host', as is often the case when the 'host' is something with a battery, such as a tablet. There is no support built into the USB spec for this, it is always assumed that the 'host' provides power to the 'device'. An example of something that isn't supported would be a tablet 'dock' with a bunch of device connectors that could also charge the tablet, all via a single USB link.
That's the only way you'd ever want to power a USB device though. It makes no sense to power the host from the device. Plus this isn't even the case with iPod docks - they're all powered in the mains.
> The problem is when you want the 'device' to power the 'host', as is often the case when the 'host' is something with a battery, such as a tablet.
The host on an iPod dock isn't the iPod; it's the dock.
> There is no support built into the USB spec for this, it is always assumed that the 'host' provides power to the 'device'. An example of something that isn't supported would be a tablet 'dock' with a bunch of device connectors that could also charge the tablet, all via a single USB link.
In this example, the dock is the host and the tablet is the device. So the tablet would still be charged.
The thing with USB is, it doesn't matter which device is the server and which is the client at the software end as that's just an arbitrary software paradigm. You can have the USB host act as the client at the software end and the device as the sever (eg a music dock will be the host, but the phone is the server and the dock the client), all you need is the two devices to be able to speak to each other. And since USB is a two way protocol (else USB storage wouldn't work), it's pretty easy to have the host as the power source and the device as the item requiring USB power even when the device is the one sending signals back to the host (eg how USB mice and keyboards work).
You're still not getting it. I want the dock to power the tablet so it charges, the dock gets power from mains does not change that at all.
> The host on an iPod dock isn't the iPod; it's the dock.
You can't make this statement definitively. If one of the features of the dock is a keyboard, it's going to be acting as a HID interface device and will be acting in device mode....
> The thing with USB is, it doesn't matter which device is the server and which is the client at the software end as that's just an arbitrary software paradigm.
This is wrong. A 'device' can never initiate a transfer, all transfers are negotiated by the 'host'. The 'host' is the bus master and manages all transfers regardless of what they are or where they are going. e.i. USB is a 'polling' interface, not a 'pushing' interface. You can not have more than 1 host on a USB bus.
Actually it's you who's missing the point. I've already told you that that does happen, it's just some handsets require a higher charge than others - and docks will only ever output the lowest required volts/amps because they wouldn't want to damage other hardware that is designed to pull less power. IIRC iPod/iPhone users had similar problems when Apple changed the input power rating for newer devices a few years ago.
> You can't make this statement definitively. If one of the features of the dock is a keyboard, it's going to be acting as a HID interface device and will be acting in device mode....
lol How many music docks act as a keyboard? Plus there's a contingency for that in the spec anyway as you can run more than one USB interface concurrently over a single USB port.
> This is wrong. A 'device' can never initiate a transfer, all transfers are negotiated by the 'host'. The 'host' is the bus master and manages all transfers regardless of what they are or where they are going. e.i. USB is a 'polling' interface, not a 'pushing' interface. You can not have more than 1 host on a USB bus.
You're missing the point. It's just a software specification. Once the devices have linked, you can programmatically design the software to work whichever way you want. As I pointed out before, there's plenty of USB devices that behave this way already; devices that -from the user perspective- both initiate and receive data.