Apple undoubtedly added Wi-Fi Aware support to iOS https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware, but its not clear whether iOS actually supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware. Apple clearly hasn't completely dropped AWDL for AirDrop, because you can still AirDrop from iOS 26 to earlier devices.
Note that the Ars Technica article never directly makes the claim that Apple supports Airdrop over Wi-Fi Aware. The title is two independent statements - "The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop" - that's true.
> Google doesn’t mention it in either Quick Share post, but if you’re wondering why it’s suddenly possible for Quick Share to work with AirDrop, it can almost certainly be credited to European Union regulations imposed under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Again, they're just theorising. They never directly make the claim. Would love on Hacker News for someone to do some Hacking and actually figure it out for real!
For example, someone found strings in Google's implementation that mentioned AWDL: https://social.treehouse.systems/@nicolas17/1155847323390351...
Also people have mentioned having success Airdropping to macOS devices, which are not listed as being supported on the Wi-Fi Aware page.
Not listed, but shipped with some Wifi Aware library
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DeviceToDeviceManager.framework/Plugins/WiFiAwareD2DPlugin.bundle
Another fun thing to do: `ping6 ff02::1%awdl0`. Pings all nearby Apple devices with AWDL active. Including things like your neighbor's phone that's not even on your local network. (but addresses rotate I believe so can't track persistently)
But maybe you can infer presence tracking the response time? Could be exploited anyway, no?
Could also detect when someone is hosting a party or something.
If people wanted these devices and services to be public infrastructure, they should be developed and maintained using public funds.
Everyone owns kitchen appliances and even if there is network support it generally requires a specific app that is out of support very early in the device lifetime. Vehicles barely support operability with phones at all and there is no standard UI or phone side vehicle monitoring.
At least personally I would like enforced open device standards on home appliances and vehicles far before I care about something like AirDrop that has work arounds.
They only do it in a green field when:
* They have big customers who demand it to avoid lock-in. Either the fear being left with orphaned equipment (e.g. car chargers being specified with MODBUS rather then a custom fieldbus), or they think their own gear will sell better with standard widgets (e.g. computer builders and USB). Militaries are especially keen on these requirements, and MIL standards drove loads of 20th century standardisations by economies of scale.
* They are forced to at regulatory gunpoint (some overlap with the above when the customer is a government).
* They think it'll be cheaper than the return from lock in, (e.g. easily cloned/replaced commodities like screws)
In a brown field where there are other standards or implementors around, they may also
* want to break into someone else's walled garden (everyone else wanting into Tesla chargers)
* Figure that there's a win-win as an attempted lock-in opportunity has passed (e.g. car makers trying to do a proprietary nozzle for lead free fuels would have just made their cars get a reputation for being a hassle to fuel).
When it comes to consumer goods, the asymmetry in the relationship is severe and regulators are constantly playing catch up. Everyone from Soda Stream to car charger manufacturers are trying to throw up walls and lock in customers before anyone can do anything about it.
Regulators only have limited bandwidth and if they act too early they get dragged by the companies (and their lackeys) for market interference.
If tomorrow someone invents smart glasses that can trigger a home robot to do the laundry when I look at the pile of dirty clothes on the floor, the orchestration should be based on capabilities, not brand or ecosystem.
The only thing perhaps expedited was the push to have it on base model iphones sooner.
and when there is, its talked about as American tech companies bowing to an authoritarian regime as opposed to fighting a burgeoning market force acting on behalf of consumers and the American tech companies losing that fight
the latter is how the EU work is syndicated
in between is that there likely is no fight with Chinese regulators alongside an unwillingness to alter access to that market
I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.
We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.
They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.
They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.
Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay.
With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
Both infotainment and phones should be open to run the software users choose. The biggest problem with tech today is how everyone with control of some kind of choke point expects everyone else to pay them to “allow” the user to use anything that isn’t in the first party’s strategic interest.
We saw this when Apple violently crushed that Android-compatible iMessage solution a couple years ago. It was portrayed as that developer “hacking” Apple - not as the users of the iMessage service choosing a different client than Apple likes. This shift in thinking is wild.
Since the AT&T breakup the phone company was forced to allow customers to choose their client hardware (phones). Now in the modern day critical infrastructure, we’re back to the same old tricks where powerful parties (platform owners) want to dictate the hardware and software customers are allowed to use based purely on their own greedy interests.
Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition.
Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google.
Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive.
All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
I bet Google Maps pays for itself through ads alone. In addition Google Maps gains a lot of invaluable data from its users like new businesses, reviews, pictures, updated opening times, traffic data and more. So no Google Maps isn't really "free" it's paid for by its users with ads and free labor to improve the mapping data.
Having the users split between different navigation software is a worse user experience because the mapping data will be worse. So I welcome a monopoly in this case.
The hard work of mapping is done by the government in most countries and paid for by the tax payers. So you are just paying the car company to convert the mapping data you already paid for into their proprietary format.
> If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150.
That might be true, but it probably isn't. A larger company can spread the cost out over a larger number of customers, meaning the cost per customer is lower.
Then why are they making such terrible carplay systems?
Big tech is literally a machine putting a ceiling on your ability to build.
They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules.
If you get big enough, they self-fund an internal team to compete with you. Or they offer to buy you for less than you're worth. If you don't accept, they buy your competitor.
Capitalism should be brutal. Giant lions that can't compete should starve and give way to nimble new competition.
You shouldn't be able to use your 100+ business units to subsidize the takeover of an entirely unrelated market.
They are an invasive species and are growing into everything they can without antitrust hedge trimming. Instead of lean, starving lions, they're lion fish infesting the Gulf of Mexico. They're feasting upon the entire ecosystem and putting pressure on healthy competition.
Your own capital rewards are cut short because of their scale.
Do you like not being able to write apps and distribute them to customers? It's okay to pay their fee, jump through their hoops, be locked to release trains, pay 30%, forced to lose your customer relationship, forced to use their payment and user rails, forced to update on their whim to meet their new standards - on their cadence and not yours?
Do you like having competitors able to pay money to put themselves in front of customers searching for your brand name? On the web and in the app stores? So you have to pay to even enjoy the name recognition you earned? On top of the 30% gross sales tax you already pay? And those draconian rules?
That's fucking bullshit.
We need more competition, not less.
Winning should not be reaching scale and squatting forever. You should be forced to run on the treadmill constantly until someone nibbles away at your market. That's healthy.
Competition from smaller players should be brutal and unending.
That is how we build robust, anti-fragile markets that maximally benefit consumers. That is how we ensure capital rewards accrue to the active innovators.
Apple and Google are lion fish. It's time for the DOJ, FTC, and every sovereign nation to cull them back so that the ecosystem can thrive once more.
You seem to be arguing that the EU should be doing that though. What about those of us who quite like the way Apple does things right now? I'm happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points, I quite like someone to be acting as a firewall between my device and the unfettered soup that is stuff out on the internet.
Apple's product is a well curated walled garden. I certainly understand why there are a lot of people on HN who don't like that - they see 30% that they can't claim. But one of the reasons Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience.
I disagree, may be they were at some time. Now they are successful because the walls of the well are so high. It is insanely difficult for us frogs to jump. Happy that governments are trying to bring those walls down
>> I am happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points. Good for you because you trust them. Problem is I am not. I dont trust apple/google to make that decision for me. But they dont give that choice. They are making you sacrificing freedom, choice by masking them self as secure. But underlying motive is profits and control.
I heard a story that apple asked meta for comission on ads , when meta rejected they introduced features to remove access to usage metrics to 3rd party apps. If meta agreed , you might never see the privacy features app introduced.
The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.
And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores. That seems to be cheating. When Apple convinced me their App store model was better than the alternative they had to use, y'know, persuasion.
Nokia sorta died, but at the time back in the 2000s Apple had to get through the entire phone industry to establish the iPhone. If the Europeans had any idea how to manage this sort of ecosystem they'd still be running the show. They had an amazing market position to begin with. They flubbed it because no-one in the entire continent seems to know how to run an app store! Now they're legislating their bad ideas in. It is a very European approach to commercial innovation and success.
now it is not, there are several people/companies who can make the app distribution better, efficient for all consumers. they can bring it down to a fraction (apple itself has by now bought it to a fraction of what it costs in 2000).only reason they are not passed down to consumer is because they made sure there is no competition (by force(google paying samsung to not develop its app store) or by design (Apple limiting 3rd party installs and discouraging webapps) - basically how a monopoly/duopoly behaves). it is bad for us consumers
if apple has developed all the tools libraries itself from scratch , put hardwork and sweat into it, i wont have a issue. we all know thats not the case and how much opensource tools helped.
Most of this isn’t even true. It’s 15% for most app sellers, you don’t have to use their user auth, you can maintain a direct customer relationship just fine, you’re not locked onto a release train, you only have to update when things change if you want your app to work (like literally any platform).
Nothing in GP's comment gave any indication that they were a "hyper capitalist". You're just being emotionally manipulative, disingenuous, and acting in bad faith. This is categorically inappropriate for HN.
It’s possible they’re not a capitalist and just extremely sympathetic to Apple and/or Google specifically, but that seems more of a stretch than what that commenter (to whom you’re replying) has inferred IMO
Assumptions like this are what lead to political polarization. Don't do it. Read what the poster wrote, don't try to read their mind, and use your brain responding.
I can also explain exactly why echelon's interpretation is unfounded, yet you cannot make any coherent argument and are forced to resort to allusions and baseless accusations stemming from a failure to read what I wrote. Although, that's consistent with a failure to read what ralph84 wrote, too.
Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market.
(DIN being a German standards body..)
Then again, I personally wish they remove all ports on Mac and iPhone.
Wireless charging, data transfer over wifi6 is (usually) more than fast enough, reduces attack vectors and can make everything nice and water proof.
Any fight that Apple put up was performative and them not wanting any sort of precedence to be set.
If apple had planned to drop lightning, we wouldn't still have rhe crappy USB2 controllers backing that port on those SoCs that would still would have been under development when the EU decision came down.
2023: first USB-C iPhone launched.
Compared to the iPhone, nothing else matters. Apple dragged their feet on this for eight years and the only reason the Apple fans give is that poor widdle Apple had their feelings hurt so bad when dummies whined about the 30-pin to lightning transition in 2012, that they were too scared to face that scary backlash again and therefore needed 8 years to work up the courage. It definitely wasn’t the MFi revenue that influenced them. Apple doesn’t care about profits.
The attempt of trying to paint this as a powerplay by the EU is tenuous:
- Apple, along with Microsoft and Intel are founding members of the Wi-Fi Alliance, whose objective was to introduce a standard of interoperability through Wi-Fi Aware.1
- This work commenced long before the EU showed any interest in regulating tech.
- Apple have a pretty solid history of fencing EU-mandated changes to EU devices.
- Microsoft's Windows, also deemed by the EU as a "gatekeeper" hasn't deployed Wi-Fi Aware in Windows. With no public plans to do so.2
1. https://www.washingtoninformer.com/wi-fi-aware-aims-to-conne...
2. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/2284386/...
If Airdrop was changed to use Wifi-Aware due to EU regulation it very likely wouldn't be enabled worldwide.
Guess this type of consumer-benefic changes wouldn't happen in the land of "freedom".
The problem with regulation isn’t that there are never any positive effects, of course there are.
The problem is it’s impossible to reliably avoid adding substantial friction to life via overly broad regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, or outdated but still-in-effect regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, at least.
If this only bothered huge companies then I would say cost of doing business, who cares, etc, but it actually affects things like how cities and towns are designed, how expensive housing is, how expensive medical treatment is, etc.
Actually, it's perfectly clear to me.
> we shouldn't have any regulation
Nope, he's not saying that at all. He's just saying that any regulation (no matter how necessary, well intended or even perfect it is) has a cost. And that cost is accumulating across all regulations.
Furthermore, that cost is easily supported by large incumbents (big fans of regulation, btw) but it hurts startups the most. Thus the more regulations a market has, the fewer startups will have. Fewer startups means less competition. Less competition means less innovation, fewer products and higher prices. We can easily see this effect unfolding in the housing, education or health markets.
Bottom line is: we must take those second order effects of regulation into consideration when talking about it.
You defeated your own argument ? Thanks !
Is it really unregulated though?
Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.
Do you have a citation for what you're saying?
They lock down individual parts to device serial numbers, this helps prevent fraudulent repair services with poor quality parts, it also ensures Apple is always involved in the repair process and they can make a lot of money on that.
They use a proprietary RAM design, this significantly improves hardware speeds but also stops you replacing or upgrading the modules yourself. They also just happen to charge a serious premium on RAM capacity, and don't sell the modules on their own. Even if a third-party did manufacture the modules and sell them separately, they are also locked down to serial numbers.
This is Apple's bread and butter, enforcing consumer hostile practices and spinning it into a benefit, usually filled with half-truths to muddy the waters. In all of these situations, it's possible to do better by the consumer but why would they? At the end of the day they're here to make money, as much as they possibly can, and they're uncontested in their own vender hardware, doesn't mean we shouldn't call them out for their awful practices every time they appear.
Apple argues that the law was dumb environmentally due to many people having Lightning-cables that wouldn't work in the future, so they obviously can't have intended to do the same changeover at the same time as the EU forced them to
Show me anyone who had more than a couple of working Lightning cables left when they eliminated their last Lightning device.
I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.
Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them.
Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms.
Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think they have to be even broken up due to their monopolistic behaviors.
Apple's dominant market position and abuse of network effects via their proprietary standards, like the one we're talking about from this article.
> Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation
No-one's arguing for any equivalent of that to happen to Apple. Just that when there's an open standard for inter-device communication, they should follow that. Imagine if ASML-manufactured processors wouldn't work with standard DDR5, only with some special memory chips that only ASML could manufacture, that would be the equivalent to what Apple is doing.
Apple should enjoy the profits from when they make better products that win on their merits. But they should have to compete fairly.
European regulators are playing favoritism for themselves, not dismantling monopolies for the sake of consumers. There are a lot of companies from Spotify to ASML who are enjoying monopolistic powers in their own market, squandering innovation by not letting their competitors use their platform or implement standards created by other foreign companies. Apple being a bigger monopoly doesn't make others a saint, it's just that those monopolies suit the regulators while Apple doesn't, and that's the original point I made with the ASML example, they're being a hypocrite about it.
Which is exactly what Europe is doing. They have interoperability rules and they're applying them consistently. Nothing here is targeting Apple specifically, they're getting hit by the rules because they're a big monopoly abuser.
> There are a lot of companies from Spotify to ASML who are enjoying monopolistic powers in their own market, squandering innovation by not letting their competitors use their platform or implement standards created by other foreign companies.
What standards would those be, concretely? Have any of them bothered to pursue the EU standard designation process?
Like Google cried to every possible regulator that Apple is the big bad wolf that doesn't want to support RCE. Why? If it was that good, more people would use Androids for that.
The problem, as I see it, is that everyone else besides Apple spends very little on physical devices build quality and software polishing, and you end up with crap devices that are slow, with weird interfaces and so on.
That doesn't work when they're a monopoly. Did the whole robber baron era just not happen in your world?
I'd flip it around: Apple should make better devices so that they can retain customers on their merits, rather than because their friends' phones are going to "accidentally" lose their text messages if they dare try a non-Apple phone.
If you want an Apple analogy, imagine ASML requiring that they get 30% of all the income generated by devices that use ASML-produced chips.
yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C
edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
And a lot of chargers don't have a cable built-in, they just have a USB-A or -C port - so it's just a matter of replacing the cable. But - again, if you'd rather not do even that, you're welcome to keep using your old cable with a USB-C converter
To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.
Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.
That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.
> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
So freaking what? Since when does Apple care about what customers whine about? They didn’t actually give a flying fig when users moaned about 30-pin to Lightning, did they? Show me how they apologized or walked that back. Same for the headphone jack. Same for the one-port MacBook 12”. And the MacBook keyboard - until class action got them - they put that garbage in several generations of laptops! The point being, they could have adopted USB-C whenever they wanted to and let the whiners whine — they just didn’t want to.
Stop anthropomorphizing Tim Cook. Apple doesn’t do anything because they feel bad about customer complaints. Apple does things for profit. Profit only. If you disagree, may I point to their recent zeal to buddy up with DJT. Is that a principled embrace of that dude? Or are they just weighting anything that isn’t profit at zero and then making the rational decision from there.
This is business 101.
Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?
Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.
Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over.
The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.
didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"
They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?
> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares.
The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....
This speculation is just as weak without any evidence.
And for what it's worth, damage to the center blade does seem to be a common failure mode for USB-C and mini-usb connectors. Less frequent for something like HDMI but it does seem to happen from time to time. Lightning never felt like it locked in as securely as USB connectors do, but at the same time, every time I saw a damaged lightning connector it was always on the male (and therefore usually cheaper accessory) side.
Now, admittedly, "being yanked by a robot vacuum and falling on the ground" is outside the design parameters for a port; but I absolutely had USB-C ports fail in a way that Lightning would have not.
(Not the person you're replying to, but also a "Lightning was a better physical connector than USB-C" weirdo.)
It might be an issue with the USB-C port used in these laptops since the ports on MacBooks feel less wobbly to me. But in the end this is just speculation and anecdotal.
So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.
There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
Fortunately MagSafe works fine!
A small amount of lint gets into the hole. You pack it in when you plug in the cable. Repeat a thousand times and now you have a stiff “plug” of lint that prevents the connector from fully entering your device.
What do you guys all do with your devices?!?
To be fair, Lightning ports were prone to being clogged with lint, but that was fixable in twenty seconds with a safety pin.
USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.
Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.
> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.
> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.
Are you sure it's the center tongue which takes all the stress, and not the round shell?
AFAIK, USB-C is designed so that the cable breaks before the port, because the parts which wear the most with use (the contact and retention springs) are in the cable, not on the device.
My phone is now 6 years old, zero problems on usb-c connector
Groan. Come on. Cite one. A single "Apple engineer" to support this ridiculous claim of insider knowledge. What year do you think it is?
You understand that the SoC and I/O blocks are largely shared between the Mac and the iPad / iPhone now, right? This invention of some big bifurcation is not reality based. The A14 SoC (which became the foundation for the Mac's M1) had I/O hardware to support USB-C all the ways back to the iPhone 12. Which makes sense as this chipset was used in iPads that came with USB-C.
Pretty weird for hardware that is largely the same to "not like each others standards".
They're different even between A19 Pro in an iPhone Air and the one in 17 Pros! The Air one doesn't support 10Gbps USB-C.
"They're different even between A19 Pro in an iPhone Air and the one in 17 Pros"
The SoC and I/O blocks are quite literally identical. An A19 Pro is an A19 Pro, aside from binning for core disables. The difference is in the wiring and physical connector on the device which puts a ceiling on the features supported, one of which is 10Gbps. The Air famously includes some new "3D printed" super thin Titanium USB-C port, using the 4 pins rather than the "pro" 9 pin 10Gbps capable connector. The SoC is identical, they just only wired it up for USB 2.0.
Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.
The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.
And for what?
> Apple designers eventually hope to remove most of the external ports and buttons on the iPhone, including the charger, according to people familiar with the company’s work. During the development of the iPhone X, Apple weighed removing the wired charging system entirely. That wasn’t feasible at the time because wireless charging was still slower than traditional methods. [0]
Actual rumors include a prototype of said phone making rounds around the office.
And again, Mark Gurman from 2025:
> "But all of these changes were supposed to be just the tip of the iceberg: Apple had originally hoped to get ever more ambitious with this model... An even bigger idea was to make the Air device Apple’s first completely port-free iPhone. That would mean losing the USB-C connector and going all-in on wireless charging and syncing data with the cloud."
> "But Apple ultimately decided not to adopt a port-free design with the new iPhone, which will still have a USB-C connector. One major reason: There were concerns that removing USB-C would upset European Union regulators, who mandated the iPhone switch to USB-C and are scrutinizing the company’s business practices." [1]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/why-apple...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-16/apple-...
Apple prototypes a lot of shit internally. I am utterly certain they had prototypes of wireless-only phones. I am wholly unconvinced they had anything resembling firm plans at a leadership level to actually move forward with such a device. Apple has been more than happy to poke a finger in the eye of the EU repeatedly to see what their real limits are; I doubt they suddenly got cold feet over this one issue.
Wired CarPlay is not holding Apple back. I think they just figure it’d be harder for them to repair partially-bricked iPhones if they had no port to do DFU or whatever. That or they actually have done the market research and customers said they’d hold off on buying a portless iPhone because it’s a stupid idea.
Apple prototypes a lot of stuff including a smart car. Despite what people think, Apple doesn’t do everything at the whim of the EU.
But Apple could definitely make the “non-pro” phone portless- exactly the way they arbitrarily force USB 2.0 speeds (hello 2004!) even on the iPhone 17 non-pro’s port - rendering it worse than Wi-Fi for data transfers.
They must have market research proving it would cost them sales. That’s the only thing holding them back.
WiFi speeds are decent for data.
Wireless charging is 2 hours to a full quick charge and efficiency gets better every generation.
As for wired CarPlay somebody would make dongles.
Also the iPhone Pro models support up to 10Gbps wired for data transfer. Now let’s talk about using external video. I don’t need a special dongle. I can use a standard USB 3 cable just like I use with my computer.
Or if I need HDMI, again I can use the same USB 3 to HDMI cable that works with Mac or the God awful Microsoft Surface (not the convertible) I had to use for a year at a prior job.
Then we can get into simple things like how do you connect mass storage devices to your phone or audio equipment?
And when you view what Apple is doing from their long-term vision of the iPhone becoming a transparent piece of glass, it starts making sense.
- I don’t need a USB-C to headphone adapter, there are plenty of USB C headphones and the mixer my wife uses has a USB C interface for computers and it works with her iPad and I assume my phone. It shows up as an audio input/output device. You plug up a regular old USB C to USB C cable.
- you don’t need an “HDMI adapter”, you use the same USB C to HDMI cord that computers have used since USB C was introduced on computers over a decade ago.
USB C has supported video natively for over a decade. I use the same USB C - USB C cable to plug up my phone to my external monitor that I use for my Mac
Bluetooth doesn’t transmit data at 10Gbps like USB C does on an iPhone Pro or even USB 2 speeds of the cheaper iPhones.
You don’t need special Apple compatible dongles for any of these use cases. They all support the standard USB protocols
Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
Outside of America this has been obvious since the mid 2000s when people complained about a proliferation of chargers with phones because pre-iPhone the non US cellphone market was far more advanced.
Apple never apologized for the changeover, the iPhone 5 sold like hotcakes, everyone quickly loved having a reversible and small cable that was less fragile than 30pin, and everyone lived happily ever after. The whiny boomers annoyed that they had to finally replace a dock they bought in 2004 for an iPod made zero difference to anything. People whining online are not a problem at all unless they stop buying — and nobody stopped buying. After all, switching to Android would have necessitated buying a new cable anyway, at any point prior to 2023!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyTA33HQZLA&t=19s
and then they went all-USBC on the MBP before the ecosystem was ready, got absolutely slammed for it, and went back (on magsafe). 4 times bitten, once shy. I'm sure the cynical money reason played a role too, of course, but nobody else is mentioning the 4 times bitten so I felt obliged.
I upgraded my iPad to a USB-C version and discovered I couldn't use my 1st-gen (Lightning) Apple Pencil with it even though it's compatible -- because I first had to buy a special female-female USB-C<->Lightning dongle just to be able to plug it in to pair it. (Even though I can keep using my Lightning charger to charge it separately from my iPad.)
Moving from Lightning to USB-C hasn't been too bad for me since I use wireless charging with e.g. my Lightning AirPods. But the transition is a huge pain. Because of weird cases like the Pencil, it's not even enough to just have a USB-C charging cable and a Lightning charging cable.
The Pencil situation is a disaster. There are at least 3 first party versions plus the 3rd party ones. And when version X + 1 comes out they don’t drop support for version X, they use it in a different product for some stupid reason. Probably because the tooling already exists.
So you can find entire matrices online attempting to explain which iPads support which pencils.
It’s horrible. The Lightning -> USB-C transition is probably one of least objectionable parts of pencil history.
Apple has had MfI certification on Apple compatible products for decades & has actively wanted to protect that revenue stream & domain of control. If folks could just plug in devices & have them just work, that would erode their ownership.
And just as bad, it would raise all sorts of questions like "why does this mouse not do anything on my iPhone" and obscure the careful market delineations Apple vigorously has established between its products (which makes people buy more products than they need). Apple never wanted to be a good guy, Apple never wanted to lower itself to the common market of peripherals and standards. Their involvement with USB-C was likely far far far before it was apparent their device teams would have to give up MfI controls.
And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users.
In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible?
USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.
You are correct, the dock connector for was not.
And they couldn’t go to USB-C instead of Lightning initially as Lightning came out first.
A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years.
The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.
I'd wait to blame the EU also.
There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.
Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified.
Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c
Or either misrepresenting the facts because you are a fan boy of a trillion dollar company. Please dont if its latter.
It’d also a benefit for Apple, since once upstreamed it shares the maintenance burden across all participants.
The whole selling point of Apple was that as long as you're inside the ecosystem, you'll get the smoothest experience. Well, now the law says that devices, apps and products from third parties should be able to be used on an iPhone as seamlessly as Apple's own products, of course they wouldn't have given that up willingly.
I literally do not care about the wanky culty Android this Apple that stuff. I just want to plug my phone into my Mac and have it be able to read it, regardless of what phone that is. When someone needs to send me a document, I don't want them to have to change how they send it based on what device I have. Regulation and enforcing common interoperability standards is good for consumers; I don't care whose implementation wins out, just that all my devices support it.
If "think of the children" feels like manufactured consent for the erosion of rights, spending money supporting Tim "Client Side Scanning" Cook isn't going to yield some moral reprisal from Apple. Emotionally manipulating you into accepting conditional surveillance is part of Apple's security model. They're the "good guys" and they don't need to prove it.
This is what "interoperability" actually looks like in practice: nobody forces Apple to ship AirDrop-for-Android, they just force them off a proprietary stack and onto a public standard, and suddenly Google can meet them on neutral ground. The EU didn’t create a feature, it removed Apple’s ability to say "we technically can’t."
Also notice the asymmetry: once both sides sit on Wi-Fi Aware, Apple gets basically nothing by embracing Quick Share, but Google and users get a ton from being able to talk to AirDrop. So the market on its own would never converge on this, because the only player who could unlock the value had the least reason to. You need a regulator to make the defection from proprietary to standard mandatory, then "open" just looks like someone finally flipping a bit that was always there.
"Contacts only mode" will always be a challenge, but at least the "I just want to share a file without Google watching me" use case is now resolved by Google implementing a standard that doesn't involve them.
Unfortunately, this is Pixel 10 exclusive for now, for some reason. I expect Samsung to pick this up eventually as well, but I'm not sure if Google will be able to backport this tech through Google Play Services the way they did with Nearby Share on older phones.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-confirms-Quick-Share-...
[1]: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl?tab=readme-ov-file#require...
The account requirement for nearby share never made sense yet they still did it the way...
The account requirement can already be avoided using existing implementations of standard QuickShare (i.e. https://henriqueclaranhan.github.io/rquickshare/) but those are limited to devices sharing the same WiFi connection. However, as there is no contact sharing between iOS and Android, interoperability basically forces Google to pick between "Google account optional" and "doesn't work with iOS".
The UK has ARM. The Netherlands has ASML. But those are B2B suppliers. Europe, with it's regulatory overreach, has very few consumer technology companies of any consequence
People voted against it. Bigly.
It can't reliably work between two adjacent rooms in my home without arm-waving.
A hundred or thousand mile trip through iCloud works tons better.
It's the best way (if it works!) to transfer full quality live images quickly, but otherwise I'd be happier just using Signal.
Then again, I transferred 4 iPhone photos to the imac 2 feet away and it failed. Worked on the next try. It's flakey as hell, and this is a 3rd generation iPhone SE and M2 mac mini. Not exactly old. I really hate bluetooth.
I got an old Time Capsule at the thrift store, that checked out but I haven't made use of it. It might be time. FWIW, I got PhotoSync app (not free) long ago so as to share photos with "everything" and it runs in the background on the mac, but I stupidly hold to the notion that whatever comes with the operating system otta work.
Why didn't the standard Bluetooth way of doing this gain any traction? What was wrong with it?
[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Bluetoo...
The trick is that it doesn’t use AWDL: macOS (but not iOS) also supports AirDrop via local network, although it’s not enabled by default: https://github.com/vinint/MoKee-WarpShare/issues/3#issuecomm...
The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.
Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).
Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
However I would preferred a backwards compatibility lightning 2.0 upgrade. Cleaning a usb-c port is a huge pain and they are more prone to pocket lint clogging than lightning.
It happened to me at least.
I have to clean my port maybe once a year or so. I wait until the cables aren't locking and then I clean it out. The dental pick makes it easy and you are just dislodging that compacted mat of lint and removing it. Conversely, my wife never has the problem. Her phone never goes into a pocket, just her purse.
It made all the iPhone docks/speakers/etc. obsolete. The last time that happened, when Apple swapped the old 30 pin connector for lightning, it pissed off a fair number of customers.
This time they could blame the EU which was likely a huge plus.
https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
Not sure why that is, but something to ponder.
But apparently unless you're a suckup to the authoritarian entity that you like is now a LINO.
Basically, libertarian on social issues paired with a preference for a decentralized economy, as opposed to a "tankie" (Stalinist) style centrally planned economy.
Here you go:
My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.
The reason is lobby, not innovations.
This is telling a lot about US companies complaining about EU laws.
ALL companies should be beholden to common standards of interoperability. It infuriates me that I can plug my Android phone into Windows and it reads it just fine but that plugging it into my Mac does nothing because a bunch of executives are circle jerking each other; this stuff isn't good for US, the consumers.
How can we have that cool future where we swipe a media file over towards a person in AR and have it automatically sent to them when we're allowing companies to use the standards they like and dodge ones they don't so that they can create a "platfoooorm" hurr de durr. The "platform" is the entire fucking ecosystem of devices out there.
I had previously used the built-in webserver for transfers from Android to Apple.
I do have much greater luck with LocalSend transfers when I tether them to my own WiFi prior to transfer.
"Evidence that self-regulation works: Apple, Google adopt new WiFi standards"
btw safari is a fine browser but on iOS it seems crippled a bit.
we are already getting there with support for web-gpu.
it's not a fine browser if laymen have to update the OS just to get a new browser update.
If Apple says sure, implement this FaceTime spec. Facebook does the same thing, go ahead and implement Messenger video chat.
Now you have the Android NewVideoChat app which supports its own protocol, Facebook's and Apple's. A user with NewVideoChat tries to invite a NewVideoChat user, an Apple user and a Facebook user to a video chat.
Except Facebook Messenger's app doesn't support Apple's Facetime app doesn't support Facebook Messenger, so you run into some issues. Something needs to dupe the stream out to all three services which use radically different payloads and encryption methods - and they have to do it without breaking end-to-end encryption. Do it at the client-side and the Android app users will need to dupe their own streams three times and at least one user will need to relay the other two other streams, with all the bandwidth and latency issues that entails. Do it on the server side and you somehow need to translate between protocols (and possibly codecs!) without decrypting them.
And if your video group chat supports private messaging between a subset of participants, you can end up in a situation where a Facebook user wants to send something to a Facetime user without the NewVideoChat user seeing it.. which is a bit of a problem.
Then instead of just opening up NFC, make Google and Apple Wallet support plugins, so users can have one interface with all their cards but not tied to one payment system.
Weird thing to say given that AirPlay is also locked down as well...they're both the same. But I agree with the overall sentiment; a common wireless streaming standard would be amazing. It would mean I can use more devices to throw Samsung DEX at.
Hell, if all monitors/TVs/displays came with basic "receive a standard stream from wifi" support that would be so great for consumers, reduces friction so much.
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994854
> Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
On the paper it looks great, but the problem is the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens. It’s great for my Apple products, but I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
Whatever gave you this impression? That’s not what the story is saying at all.
> the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens
It is not supposed to. The EU is a group of states, not citizens. If you want your voice to really count, lobby your national government, which has more say in the councils of ministers or the council of Europe than the MEPs have.
> I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
How big is that "entire lavish class"? Just to know how upset I need to be. Also, which law was "written by lobbies"?
Yes, EU citizens probably absolutely love not being able to conveniently share files between Android and iOS.
> I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
What lobbies, in this particular case? Google? Samsung?
That said, they are setting a good example of legislating for tech. We should be doing a lot of that here in the US. I don't need a bulletproof, ultra-secure, end-to-end encrypted, formally verified phone (although that would be nice). As a boring regular person, I want to not have to need all of that because my government will imprison people that violate my rights. But more on-topic, the FTC (EDIT: FCC) exists to regulate among other things, wireless comms, so this would be something they should be legislating.
Although, putting on my tech hat, I need to re-state that I disagree with this move. I want tech companies to experiment and use faster, more secure, more reliable comms tech without having to worry about compatibility. It is in my interest as a consumer.
Lightning was a superior technology to USB-C, we don't have it now because the EU forced apple's hands. I don't want to lose out on good tech. The EU should have instead forced everyone else to use lightning if they want things simpler.
Why is the EU intent on having inferior tech, inferior capability, inferior pay, inferior innovation-friendly environment. They have the power to demand better things and provide them for their people. The compromise isn't needed. At the risk of offending the HN crowd, I'll even say that the EU shouldn't support open-source things unless they are actually the superior tech. You can't eat or pay your bills with ideals. If commercial/properietary tech is better for europeans, that is what the EU should focus on.
I will drive European or Japanese cars that are better than American cars, I don't mind doing the same with tech, except with Europe that's getting more and more rare. What happened to Nokia and Ericsson. NL has ASML, wouldn't it be nice if we had a TSMC competitor in Europe as well? I don't want to keep going on, but I hope my point is clear.
Competition is good, Android shouldn't need to support AirDrop, it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.
Instead competition, the EU is wanting forced mediocrity. They are within their rights for sure, but it isn't the best thing to do.
I only wish they did the same thing with electrical outlets and forced the world to use one mediocre standard :)
Okay, so, why don't we see competition in places where it matters, like Airdrop, iMessage and the App Store?
The answer seems to be pretty simple, to me; Apple considers themselves above competition. It doesn't matter if a superior system exists, they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone. It's a lose/lose situation between consumers and the economy, who neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
> Apple considers themselves above competition
In literally every market apple is in, they have intense competition!?
> they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone
Ugh.. yeah.. shouldn't they be allowed to sell things that they believe will sell well? I mean on one hand people complain about cheap devices engineered with planned obsolescence, and then you complain about what.. better quality? If they believe it is a superior system, then certain, I want that as a consumer. Why don't you? And I also thing being able to buy a different phone is great, that means no monopolies, that's what we all want right?
> neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
I am getting a superior hardware and software for apple. What his happening now is, for no amount of money I could possibly earn can I get a good quality product, I have to settle with EU's forced mediocrity even though I don't live in the EU. People who can't afford apple products have alternatives, but that isn't enough for you, you want everyone to get participation trophies? that's what it sounds like, i could be wrong, it sounds like you don't want to feel envious of people who get superior products? Even though there are many android phones more expensive than iPhones, so it isn't even a question of affordability. it's just forced mediocrity. With no upsides to anyone other than people who feel great about "america bad" "middle finger to apple".
Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love. I don't care if you think Apple's brand appeal is diminished by prosecuting their anticompetitive zeal. That's not my problem. You will have to "settle" for it anywhere iPhones are sold, because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, etc.. they're all threats to iMessage. These apps even make themselves the default SMS handler so that the only thing iMessage is good for is native iMessage messages. It isn't distributed outside of Apple ecosystem either unlike its competition, Apple is doing the opposite of dominating the market there.
How is Safari segregated? Most Mac users (including me) install Firefox or Chrome typically. Are you saying Apple doesn't face competition, or are you saying Apple doesn't compete enough (which I don't see how that's a fault?)
I don't think the appstore is particularly more competitive than android's.
The appstore is the only area where there might be legitimate antitrust allegations. Even then, I'm with apple there because it is in the interest of their consumers. You already have the bland and mediocre android, don't ruin apple for the rest of us. Monopoly is exactly what you're advocating for, monopoly of the mediocre and bland. There is absolutley no service or product apple makes where there aren't enough alternatives, or where apple has created an anti-competitive dependency.
> Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love
Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple did it the opposite way, because they make products that last and are durable! with lightning the wear and tear impacts the cable (male) end the most, so it's a matter of replacing cables. with USB-C, the device end needs repair and replacement. Now i'm stuck with your bland mediocre thing. Why am i paying the price for android users' envy?? Same with app store, I don't want b.s. crap android apps, i used android long enough and i hated it, i don't poor quality crap.
Why don't you get that freedom means everyone gets an option, everyone gets to do what they want without harming others. Apple users love apple products. Even when you tell us how android phones have better specs, better hardware, more up to date, we still like apple precisely because of Apple's business practcies that improve the user experience for us. And now you want it to be just like android, why? You have the choice to use android already, why do you need to take away my freedom to use the kind of products apple creates?
I want an extremely closed and gated app store. I want background checks on app developers, forget just ID'ing them. I want it to be a costly endeavor to write iOS apps. I liked lightning, I love iMessage, I recommend it over Signal. I used signal and I have lost a LOT due to it's backup/recovery mess, I've suffered a lot under crappy android apps. airdrop works prefectly, I don't want someone with a buggy/malwared android phone sending airdrops to me, I don't want shoddy android messaging clients sending me imessage messages. Apple is doing what we as its users want. You the majority android users are taking away the choice of the minority apple users.
> because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Of course not, but you were hoping for a mass defection. Apple still makes superior products and we get that it is crappy EU law making that is forcing this. What would I defect to if I didn't like USB-C? You took away the one choice I had. Every android device uses USB-C. Your entire platform here is taking away people's choices and freedoms.
You're not helping anyone get on an equal footing, because by your own admission, they were unequal before right? All you've done is take away the choice of apple's users. Did android messages gain anything with iMessage compatiblity? Did android phones gain anything by apple using usb-c? Do android phones benefit from apple allowing more app stores? No, the only people that benefit are crappy developers that spread their mediocrity everywhere. No apple competitor is gaining a competitive advantage by these measures.
There have always been third party lightning cable makers, I can't think of any major app that isn't available on the app store. Consumers aren't complaining about this. I'll concede that having to store both lightning and usb-c is annoying, but hey.. don't buy apple and avoid USB-C!!?? You literally don't have to use apple products. If product design was considered freedom of speech (is it?) you'd be coercing speech and banning speech you disagree with because it annoys you.
This is weaponized enshittification!
I have one of every Apple device category except the HomePod. But this is a horrible take. I can now use my same USB C cables everywhere.
But more importantly, I can use standard USB C peripherals from network adapters USB C external monitors, standard USB C to HDMI cords, plug a USB C storage device in etc
I don't care if apple required manually splicing wires to charge your phones (safely), how is it the government's right to force them to not do that? The whole point of having a free society is small things like this. I keep posting long posts on HN, so let me cut it short and say that lots of freedoms can be taken away in the name of convenience to others. Companies should be punished for monopolistic practices, but they shouldn't be punished for imagining alternative ways of doing things and succeeding with that. I've had android phones where the USB connector on the phone end broke or degraded, you can hopefully see my perspective as well? How can we have a free society like this if we can't even resolve and tolerate very small differences of opinion like this?
Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads.
You’ve had cheap Android phones if you had that problem. Have you heard reports of that being a problem with iPhones?
As far as compatibility, I carry around an external USB C powered external monitor for my laptop. It gets power and video from one cord on a computer.
I can take that same monitor and that same USB C cord and plug it up to my iPhone.
This is me sitting at a Delta lounge watching either Breaking Bad or Better Caul Saul with my phone connected to my second monitor
The iPhone by itself can only power it to 50% brightness. But there you see if I plug in a battery to the second USB C port, it can power the monitor at full brightness and charge my phone.
USB C is better in every way.
Those are two separate things.
These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.
In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.
There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.
So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.
Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.
With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.
USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.
USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.
Honestly, because Apple has always had the major advantage of being one company, whereas and Android market is fragments, with both prod and cons. That Samsung competes decently with Apple because they've created kind of their own ecosystem shows exactly why it is important to regular interoperability and prevent walled garden behaviours.
Otherwise we'll end up with just Apple/Samsung. Or perhaps even just Apple...which I know the cult will argue would be a great thing.
It's the same everywhere; countries with a 2 party political system always experience huge problems because of it.
FCC purview?