Apple to Stick With Lightning Over USB-C for 'iPhone 12' Before Going Port-Less Next Year

[NineEyeRon]

This seems a good decision, it will cut out a lot of e waste compared to a sudden switch to USB C or something else.

[sof006]

If Apple goes portless i'll switch back to Android in a heartbeat. I like my iPhone 11 for its speed and simplicity but I like my charging port, wireless charging is nice but its definitely not a replacement for a port. Especially if something goes wrong with the software and you need to restore your phone in iTunes, take away that port and I don't know how you'd reinstall iOS.

 

If this is indeed something Apple plans I can see this backfiring fast. 

[kelvinhall05]

Slightly unrelated but imagine Magsafe on an iPhone, that would be fucking amazing.

[StDragon]

1 hour ago, NineEyeRon said:

This seems a good decision, it will cut out a lot of e waste compared to a sudden switch to USB C or something else.

The EU has or is trying to mandate a universal charging standard. Qi is already an industry standard for wireless induction charging.

 

Apple will either create their own standard which can be powered by USB-C; thereby ostensibly adhering to the mandate. Or, stick with Qi and side-step the issue altogether by not having a port to begin with. 

[Guest]

A twitter post isn’t exactly an official source 

[Blademaster91]

5 hours ago, StDragon said:

It's a conflict of interest to be sure. One one hand, they want to provide a seemingly good quality product to their customers. On the other, they will lock-down and control the supply chain so prevent said market saturation. The end-game for Apple (and all companies) is a reoccurring revenue stream via subscription model and leasing of hardware. Ultimately they're selling an experience rather than a single piece of hardware. In fact, the goal is ambient computing where your iDevice is but an extension to their cloud platform, and is treated as such. Far easier to predict your next quarterly earnings (shareholders love that) outlook when you have a near-guaranteed revenue stream.

 

But as for the quality of their hardware, it's no better than the rest of the industry. Louis Rossmann has a thing or two to say about that. In fact, he has an entire company and Youtube channel dedicated to that very topic.

The locking down and limiting the supply chain is something Apple already does, for instance Apple charges you for a motherboard replacement when all that failed is a display flex cable, or in phones locking down the battery or display with proprietary chips so any other repair shop simply cannot service your phone.

And people shouldn't be dismissing what Louis Rossmann does, because him pushing for higher quality products that aren't designed to fail and are also more easily repaired instead of thrown away is a good thing.

I think going with no charging port is a terrible decision, and a magnetic pin pad isn't so great either, the conductive layer can come off of the pins, as it does with the lightning connector.

[Monkey Dust]

3 hours ago, StDragon said:

The EU has or is trying to mandate a universal charging standard. Qi is already an industry standard for wireless induction charging.

 

Apple will either create their own standard which can be powered by USB-C; thereby ostensibly adhering to the mandate. Or, stick with Qi and side-step the issue altogether by not having a port to begin with. 

Or including a USB-C to lightning dongle in the EU for charging purposes

[Kisai]

18 hours ago, AshRiver said:

https://www.macrumors.com/2020/05/26/leaker-iphone-12-keeps-lightning-portless-2021/

Uh oh. I smell another dongle cable coming or not! Apple is going to make a small fortune out of this next dongle for those don't like wireless charging if Apple can pull it. Forcing people to use wireless headset when Apple remove 3.5mm headphone jack is enough, but this time forcing wireless charging? 

Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted a lot of things that also have not come to pass. Just because the idiot stock analysts want something to be true, doesn't make it true. This is the same guy who's been predicting Apple will switch to ARM every year for last 10 years. This is the same kind of guy who goes "this year will be the year of Linux", there's just no substantiated reason why, because the person making the statement is not an engineer, and doesn't know why X is not Y yet.

 

At best:

- I have no love for the lightning cable, it sucks. USB-C is better by any measure.

- As like the last time this came up on LTT, people would actually prefer something more like the mag-safe connector for mobile phones and tablets, at least for charging, because it prevents accidents from tripping over the cord.

- Wifi and Bluetooth have the syncing/data transfer already covered, so it's not like anything is materially lost by losing the data transfer portion of the cable, however Apple will need to make it so that the iPhone is reachable via SMB while on WiFi in an easier context than reaching a Mac is presently. Apple Time Capsules kinda had the right idea here, just show the device filesystem when on WiFi via Bonjour.

 

However, if you know your mobile phone history, you will also know why we stopped having "surface" connector chargers. Because coins and keys in peoples pockets would short out the phone. If you're going to do the "smart" magnetically attached charger, you do it by having magnetically activated pins so that you don't burn down your house when the charger cable inevitably ends up touching something it shouldn't.

 

 

[Shreyas1]

Remember when "apple is going to remove the charging port next" was just a meme

[Curious Pineapple]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

However, if you know your mobile phone history, you will also know why we stopped having "surface" connector chargers. Because coins and keys in peoples pockets would short out the phone. If you're going to do the "smart" magnetically attached charger, you do it by having magnetically activated pins so that you don't burn down your house when the charger cable inevitably ends up touching something it shouldn't.

100mA current limit on both phone and charger initially and only increase once a handshake has been performed. Nothing is going to burn down or end up damaged by shorting if they're designed correctly.

[StDragon]

2 hours ago, Kisai said:

This is the same guy who's been predicting Apple will switch to ARM every year for last 10 years.

 Uh, the Apple A series of CPUs are ARM based. And the new Macbook for 2021 will run a 5nm 12-core Apple processor that's ARM as well.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, StDragon said:

 Uh, the Apple A series of CPUs are ARM based. And the new Macbook for 2021 will run a 5nm 12-core Apple processor that's ARM as well.

Article quotes Bloomberg who quotes an other part of Bloomberg who quotes unnamed sources that could very well be that guy.

[StDragon]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Article quotes Bloomberg who quotes an other part of Bloomberg who quotes unnamed sources that could very well be that guy.

They're moving to ARM to unify software development. It's not hard to see them doing this. They developed their own SoC A series, and OSX started off running X86 when prior they were running on Motorola.

 

Apple isn't a PC. The fact it shared PC architecture was out of convenience. Apparently the bean counters at Apple think it's time to divest from Intel and go ARM for every single device.

 

It will be a slow transition, so don't expect x86 to be punted overnight though. It's a weaning process.

[Zodiark1593]

7 hours ago, Kisai said:

Ming-Chi Kuo has predicted a lot of things that also have not come to pass. Just because the idiot stock analysts want something to be true, doesn't make it true. This is the same guy who's been predicting Apple will switch to ARM every year for last 10 years. This is the same kind of guy who goes "this year will be the year of Linux", there's just no substantiated reason why, because the person making the statement is not an engineer, and doesn't know why X is not Y yet.

 

At best:

- I have no love for the lightning cable, it sucks. USB-C is better by any measure.

- As like the last time this came up on LTT, people would actually prefer something more like the mag-safe connector for mobile phones and tablets, at least for charging, because it prevents accidents from tripping over the cord.

- Wifi and Bluetooth have the syncing/data transfer already covered, so it's not like anything is materially lost by losing the data transfer portion of the cable, however Apple will need to make it so that the iPhone is reachable via SMB while on WiFi in an easier context than reaching a Mac is presently. Apple Time Capsules kinda had the right idea here, just show the device filesystem when on WiFi via Bonjour.

 

However, if you know your mobile phone history, you will also know why we stopped having "surface" connector chargers. Because coins and keys in peoples pockets would short out the phone. If you're going to do the "smart" magnetically attached charger, you do it by having magnetically activated pins so that you don't burn down your house when the charger cable inevitably ends up touching something it shouldn't.

 

 

Newer iPhones have that Ultra Wideband radio.  Could a hypothetical wireless charging pad use that to identify and pair with an iPhone, then use a short-range, fast Ad-Hoc wifi implementation to transfer data?

[Kisai]

19 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Newer iPhones have that Ultra Wideband radio.  Could a hypothetical wireless charging pad use that to identify and pair with an iPhone, then use a short-range, fast Ad-Hoc wifi implementation to transfer data?

Ultra Wideband has the same practical application as infrared. Line of sight, high bandwidth, potential medical uses. It is however not a replacement for bluetooth, 5G LTE or WiFi as they're different applications. 2.4Ghz+ has a practical range of about 1km given line of sight through air, but in most cases it has to go through walls, so it's practical range is about 50m. Sub-900Mhz is what Cellular carriers want, because it's cheaper for them as they have to deploy less equipment to get the same coverage. If they only have the AWS frequency (1700Mhz) or PCS (1900Mhz) frequency, they have to literately have 4 times the amount of cell sites to cover the same area.

 

Like if you put two iphones in the same room and point them at each other, potentially you have a lot of bandwidth (500Mhz, about the same as Cat6a Ethernet, or 10Gig Ethernet) between them, but you only get a range of about 30ft (about 10 meters) at that speed at 3.1Ghz-10.6Ghz). 

 

You have to keep in mind how all these Wireless technologies work. Wireless is, and has always been line-of-sight, and the ability to penetrate walls, cars, and humans is dependent on the frequency the wireless operates at, as a general rule, the higher the frequency, the less it will penetrate. That's why Cellular is 600Mhz-2100Mhz, Wifi is 2.4G-5Ghz.

http://www.yuvaengineers.com/ultra-wide-band-uwb-frequency-a-study-and-review-d-amrutha-k-maneesha/

 

It will always make me chuckle when people think holding their cell phone up to the window will help. It will not, especially tinted/coated glass like in your car, as these are designed to not absorb high frequency radiation. Any wireless product has to ultimately be made of a material that lets certain radiation frequencies in, and there will be consequences to trying to use certain ones. Remember "you're holding it wrong" with the iphone 4? This was because of the antenna location. 

 

So assuming that the user has no case on their phone, and the iphone has a thin glass back, and the official charger/"wireless dock" has some kind of magnetic positioning trickery, yes having UWB in some kind of dock would probably work about as well as long as the range was intentionally kept to a few CM to avoid radiating anything that sits above the phone, like a loft bed.

 

[AnonymousGuy]

On 5/27/2020 at 9:43 AM, kelvinhall05 said:

Slightly unrelated but imagine Magsafe on an iPhone, that would be fucking amazing.

This is what I suspect they're going with.  Just a 2 or 3 pin magnetic connector.  No one uses lightning for data anyways so those pins are unneeded.  

 

USB C is a compromise and inferior connector and I hope it never exists on my iphone.  It has zero advantages with a phone application over lightning.

[DarthEoin]

1 hour ago, AnonymousGuy said:

This is what I suspect they're going with.  Just a 2 or 3 pin magnetic connector.  No one uses lightning for data anyways so those pins are unneeded.  

 

USB C is a compromise and inferior connector and I hope it never exists on my iphone.  It has zero advantages with a phone application over lightning.

1 loads of people use lightning for data like transfering files to pc or useing auido

2 the advantage of usb c is that it can be used with lots of devices

3 usb c is alot faster than lightning

4 usb c suports full desplay port which can go up to 8k 60hz  

[Curious Pineapple]

On 5/27/2020 at 4:33 PM, Commodus said:

Not seemingly... and while Apple definitely isn't perfect, saying its hardware is no better than "the rest of the industry" just isn't true.  Many lower-end Windows laptops are made of flimsier materials and take shortcuts in other areas, like the battery.  Strictly anecdotally, I know of more than a few horror stories of laptops from Dell, HP and the like that failed repeatedly where those stories are considerably rarer in the Mac crowd.  I'd chalk that up at least partly to Apple focusing on the premium space to start with, but that still leaves Apple being more reliable overall.

Ah yes, the old "compare a premium brand to the cheapest alternative on the market and parade around over how much better your device at 5X the cost is"

 

Lamborghini have issues with cars combusting due to exhaust heat, but who cares about that when the Ford KA had some rust issues for a few years.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Ah yes, the old "compare a premium brand to the cheapest alternative on the market and parade around over how much better your device at 5X the cost is"

 

Lamborghini have issues with cars combusting due to exhaust heat, but who cares about that when the Ford KA had some rust issues for a few years.

Comparing a $500,000 Lamborghini vs a 15,000 Ka to a $2500 mac vs a $2000 pc isn’t any more fair though. I’m not saying your totally wrong but it is an exaggeration. Apple has a market they know how to serve.  That market is not most people here.

[Curious Pineapple]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Comparing a $500,000 Lamborghini vs a 15,000 Ka to a $2500 mac vs a $2000 pc isn’t any more fair though. I’m not saying your totally wrong but it is an exaggeration. Apple has a market they know how to serve.  That market is not most people here.

Lower end Windows laptops are a lot less than 2 grand

[Bombastinator]

Just now, Curious Pineapple said:

Lower end Windows laptops are a lot less than 2 grand

So are lower end Mac laptops.  They do start closer to a grand than a few hundred.   The salient point I think is that as gamers we are not the Mac market or the low end laptop market

[Commodus]

42 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

Ah yes, the old "compare a premium brand to the cheapest alternative on the market and parade around over how much better your device at 5X the cost is"

 

Lamborghini have issues with cars combusting due to exhaust heat, but who cares about that when the Ford KA had some rust issues for a few years.

There's more to it than that, you know.

 

Yes, companies that focus solely on premium products are less likely to have quality issues (with notable exceptions), but that's part of the point -- that many vendors sell unacceptably poor-quality products because they're determined to compete on initial price instead of, you know, a good product.  That $400 clearance special laptop sounds like a steal versus an XPS 13 or MacBook Air, but you may end up regretting it when it spends months of its life in the shop or the battery is already hobbled after a year.

 

Not to justify Apple's pricing on everything, but I do think the Windows PC and Android device industries have fallen prone to the "race to the bottom" mindset, and they need to back away from that to a degree.

[Brooksie359]

On 5/27/2020 at 10:28 AM, Sauron said:

Given what Apple has been able to pull in the past with no negative consequences on their sales I wouldn't count on it.

 

Wireless charging in my opinion makes no sense since you still need to carry a wire, a charger and a charging pad with you AND the phone needs to sit on the pad all the time so you can't even use it AND it's inherently highly inefficient compared to any type of cable. A magsafe type charger would have made infinitely more sense while still removing the "annoyance" of plugging the cable in by hand.

 

This is before any cost considerations, too - I imagine the price of the charging pad will be significant.

 

But hey, half of these concerns apply to the jack vs bt debacle too but Apple costumers didn't seem to care. It doesn't even need to be a binary choice since you can simply have both as it has been for years and yet simply removing useful features has been well received.

To be fair if you just the dongle on the end of your headphones cord and never detach it then the inconvenience isn't nearly as bad as I had first thought. On the other hand if they went only wireless that would completely eliminate the ability to use wired headphones which would definitely make people think twice if they don't like wireless headphones. And that is only one of the issues with moving to no ports. 

[Brooksie359]

23 hours ago, StDragon said:

They're moving to ARM to unify software development. It's not hard to see them doing this. They developed their own SoC A series, and OSX started off running X86 when prior they were running on Motorola.

 

Apple isn't a PC. The fact it shared PC architecture was out of convenience. Apparently the bean counters at Apple think it's time to divest from Intel and go ARM for every single device.

 

It will be a slow transition, so don't expect x86 to be punted overnight though. It's a weaning process.

That's not a coincidence that they use the same x86 processors that the pc has. Mainly software support. If it wasn't for that they could have switched a long time ago. The amount of issues that would come with moving to ARM are simply not worth the gains they would get by that move. The fact is people have said they would switch to ARM forever and yet it hasn't happened yet so I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. 

[Dabombinable]

44 minutes ago, Brooksie359 said:

That's not a coincidence that they use the same x86 processors that the pc has. Mainly software support. If it wasn't for that they could have switched a long time ago. The amount of issues that would come with moving to ARM are simply not worth the gains they would get by that move. The fact is people have said they would switch to ARM forever and yet it hasn't happened yet so I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. 

One thing's for sure - it wouldn't be as easy for Apple as moving from PowerPC to x86. Plus there is the already known fact that any x86 program emulated on ARM runs far slower.