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While the lightning cable was ahead of its time when it came out, mostly because the USB consortium couldn't get its shit together, nowadays it's woefully inferior.
Having said that, Apple has still managed to fuck their customers over by making so that only their overpriced "high speed" USB-C cables can work at anything better than USB 2.0 standard.
I doubt that 3rd parties won't try to circumvent Apple's BS, but goes to show even the EU couldn't make Apple drop the act entirely.
Edit: And that's not even talking about the wildly expensive lightning to USB-C converter they're selling to anybody desperate enough to hold onto their lightning cables
I don’t really know much about hardware and never bothered looking at transfer speeds and such, but why is lightning inferior? I like it because it’s reversible and the prong doesn’t seem like it could snap or get damaged that easily.
Not that matters much because in the three years I’ve had the phone I’ve plugged it in like five times.
USB-C has for years now supported higher wattage power delivery, and higher data transfer speeds than lightning.
I can't speak to your experience, but from mine, the build of quality of Apple's own lightning cables was terrible. I owned two IPod Touch's over the course of about 6 years, and I basically went through one cable a year because they'd just disintegrate towards the ends of the cable or internally decapitate themselves. Didn't even need to break them, they'd break themselves.
Whereas in the 6+ years I've used phones with USB-C, only two of them have broken. One was because the cable got snagged under a chair and I pulled the USB-C end off not realising it was stuck, and the other one was my Mum breaking the USB-A end shoving it into a plug the wrong way. Both things that had nothing to do with the build quality of the cables. I still have every other one of my USB-C cables.
Yeah I’ve seen so many broken Apple cables. At my old work I had a MacBook for testing things, and the MagSafe charger (a MBP ca 2014) was bare by the connector. I mended it because it terrified me.
My mother also had an iPad and went through like four cables. Absolutely nuts.
I myself don’t really use cables though. My roomie is excited for USBC support because the Android based PDAs he uses for work are USBC, so of he ever forgets a cable he can still charge his phone.
I had constant issues with cables when I was still an apple user.
Loads of plastic rot and scarily browning cables.
I honestly don't get it, given the cables on my commodore 64 are still good as new 40 years later.
Yeah. They’re not cheap either.
To be fair I had a fair few cables break in the six years I had my OnePlus One, but they just stopped working, they didn’t literally fall apart.
I have a similar issue with headphone cables failing, often far too soon, but I get that too. It's wear and tear from being yanked and moved. They're also often cheap headphones. But I've had apple cables disintigrate when stored in a cupboard and not moved at all. It's like they're biodegradeable.
I suspect they're using a softner which degrades the plastic over time. Their cables are softer/more bendy than cheaper/stiffer plastic cables.
But for the price they charge, I don't see why they couldn't make them fabric covered. You can buy fabric covered cables for really cheap online, and they ship them half away across the world and still make a profit. Why can't apple do the same?
I think Apple has learned their lesson. MacBooks charging cables seems to be braided with fabric-like material these days.
Yeah. I mean it’s Apple, they definitely have the means so it’s on purpose. With Apple you’ll always get a generous helping of bullshit.
The plastic on the cord for the charger for my 2010 MacBook completely peeled off on both sides for 2-3 feet when it was about a year and a half old. Just bare twisted metal coating… it seemed dangerous or something. I took it to an Apple Store hoping for any sort of discount on a new one, and some snotty guy with a septum piercing angrily insisted that I must have habitually rolled over it with a chair. He said my only option was to buy a new one for full price (around $150). I didn’t even own a chair with wheels. All I had ever done was coil it up 3-4 times a day going between my house and coffee shops.
I ended up calling and complaining and a manager said I could get a 50% discount. Great! So I went there 2 weeks later and some guy angrily insisted HE was the manager on duty and HE didn’t approve that. So they looked at my charger and angrily insisted that I’d rolled over it with a chair and my only option was to buy a new one for full price.
Anyway, Apple was trying a lot of different coverings back then to avoid BPA or something. They ended up paying a class action settlement for some of their charging cables.
They ended up losing me as a customer forever.
Apple makes self-obsoleting trash. That's the detail you're not getting.
Apple maintains their phones with OS and security updates for much longer than any Android manufacturers I’m aware of.
They use the excuse of it having a "sleak design" to not make the cables more shielded and rigid. Since they would sell less overpriced cables if the cables lasted longer.
You also throw away the supposed superior connector when the cable frays.
I just swapped out the one that came with the phone I got in 2016. I've used it to charge every night since then and it just failed like 2 weeks ago. That's the only one I've ever had fail and it was absolutely beat to hell.
I have Lightning cables that are five years old and still as good as they were in the first day.
For one, USB-C can (if implemented) transfer data at 40Gbps vs lightning's 0.5Gbps. USB-C also charges a lot faster.
USB-C is also reversable like lightning, and the connectors are internal.
Android phones used to use USB-B micro, which wasn't reversable, but a long time go exeryone switched to USB-C which feels like at was invented to be a better version of lightning and has had many advances while being backwards compatible with early USB-C hardware.