How does it take 5 years to integrate the world's most popular and standardised connector?

Call me a cynic, but maybe they just wanted another five years of selling over priced cables and another five years of controlling another part of the "ecosystem".

as every accessory with a lightning port just became e-waste. I guess Mother Nature didn’t see that.

I think it's interesting that you see this as USB-C's fault.

If Apple had stuck to a standard connector they would have been on usb-c in a year or two anyway and none of that e-waste would exist.

Or if they went back on their word and switched to usb-c from lightning after a couple years, there would also be way less Lightning e-waste. What do you think happens to all those Lightning accessories when someone switches from iPhone to a different device?

Apple's proprietary Lightning connector is responsible for the e-waste, not USB-C or regulators.

These regulations will stop companies like Apple making proprietary connectors purely for profit that generate all the e-waste in the first place.

As far as I know the fastest charging over lightning even now is 20 Watts which is far too slow for a laptop with a large battery. I suspect that they couldn't use lightning on the macbooks for that reason.

If their intention was to limit waste then they wouldn't have continued to produce lightning accessories if the plan was to transition in just a few years

I don't know any reason why switching to USB-C would've been on Apple's roadmap. Controlling the lighting ecosystem is far too valuable for them. Apple's refusal to switch to the common USB-C is one of the reasons this law exists in it's current form.

I guess if a new/better connector comes along we have to wait for the EU to give everyone permission to move the technology forward?

The EU is mandating open standards, not specific open standards.

If a new and better connector comes around they are welcome/encouraged to use it. As long as it's an open standard and not proprietary e-waste generating junk

Theyre not stupid if you read it before writing about it on Lemmy you'd see they're required to review regularly with stakeholders to agree and amend requirements 'in line with scientific and technological progress, consumer convenience and environmental developments'

Apple would have implemented USB-C ages ago if they had any intention of ever doing it willingly.

Everything they make uses USB-C except the iphone which uses lightning and funnily enough they get a substantial cut out of every accessory and cable sale.

The EU has a FAQ somewhere addressing this, can't find it though.

And calling the EU a regional government is underplaying their power and international influence a LOT.

I doubt Apple just learned of the pending EU rule 12 months ago as it was passed.

The alternative is to take a gamble that it won't be approved and then be stuck with phones that weren't in compliance (ignoring the 24 month grace period) and having the development clock start immediately for future models. I'm sure they saw which way the winds were blowing, knew they had no populist counter argument opposing the change, and decided it was in their best interest to join literally every other manufacturer on the planet in using a standard port.

Could they?

Yeah probably. USB-C connectors are ubiquitous, I'm certain they could acquire the necessary components in short notice if they had to. From my understanding they essentially did just swap the connector and kept the same USB2.0 controller.

Did they?

I doubt it, they had plenty of notice this was coming and were likely already preparing for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if the second USB-C iPhone release gets a modern controller with USB 3.2 or even 4, and Apple talks it up like they have single-handedly made USB-C fast all by theirselves (and imply that other mobile devices haven't had the same for far longer)

You know how many fucking lawyers they have? They were well-prepared.

It's really hard to say without being personally involved. Two years is a very comfortable amount of time to implement that specific change. The biggest hurdle is passing regulatory testing early enough to begin manufacturing in time to build a large enough stockpile before release. If they really pushed it and threw enough people at it, manufacturing could begin as little as 6 months after starting. But that's a very risky timeline because about a million things will still go wrong all throughout the process, and "simple" design changes like this are never, ever simple.

I'm impressed if they began production one year after deciding to make the change. The EU directive might've been approved roughly a year ago, but Apple might've seen writing on the wall and started earlier too. Regardless of context, this is definitely not a >2-3 year process though.

I know you're not the same person they replied to, but this is "arguing out of both sides of your mouth."

It can't be that "Apple carefully plans out everything years in advance so it had to be USB-C anyway due to the difficulty in adapting a new port" and also that "they do a simple one line change in the production run to swap to USB-C" because these two things are diametrically opposed to one another.

I think it's more that USB 2 speeds at the bare minimum are a really trash value for an $800 phone. I get what you mean, as this will push the "pro" consumers who absolutely must have 4K ProRes RAW video/photo transfers to buy the Pro models, but for real. It is shitty from a consumer perspective regardless.

itr's not about sharing their plans publicly, it's about their intent being 180 of what they say now. When this was being worked on in the EU, Apple was pretty clearly against it. If their plan was to do it anyway them opposing the forced change would make no sense.

You're right. I stand corrected.

Of course they would, "I'm sorry that all your accessories no longer work guys, it was all the EU's fault".

I live in the EU so yes I know

I was talking about an abstract entity government not any government in particular

Indeed. And yet I have never mentioned anything about what age laptops I was talking about. Then again, Apple was also only manufacturer with unibody laptop whose two parts unglued when you used your laptop for anything more intensive because they designed air flow in such a way so that hot air blows on "unibody" glued part. It's just comedy all around.

I'll say this. For how much shit Steve Jobs gets, regardless of his personal life, he would never allow this shit to happen. That crazy bastard is responsible for getting rid of the floppy drive and pushing the industry towards USB 1.0 because he believed enough in it. That we would benefit.

You can find old forum posts of the original iMac launch and see how surprised and somewhat upset people are at this revelation. Now look where we are.

It takes 35.5 minutes to transfer 128GB over USB 2.0, not 24 hours.

128GB of 4k 60fps video on the iphone is roughly 5-6 hours of video. Considering MicroSD cards under ideal conditions can only write at roughly 1.5x USB 2.0 speed, you're not really saving a whole lot of time. Especially considering that sustained writes cause a lot of heat in those cards and throughput is drastically reduced within under a minute of transfer time. No idea where you got the 24h empty time from, maybe there's something wrong with your adapter.

Hey I'm with you, don't really need faster wired data speeds.

But I guess Apple has changed their goals if they are leaving out common functionality available in all other flagship devices simply because it's not strictly necessary 🤷

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Part of the issue is exactly what you just mentioned: There are a lot of different standards with varying degrees of compatibility, and none of them are visibly different from one another. There isn’t a good way to immediately identify which cables are “good” and which will just outright refuse to charge your devices. So some of my USB-C cables will charge low power devices, but not bigger things like a laptop or iPad.

Meanwhile, the lightning charger was really really good at enforcing uniformity across different cables. Because you knew you could plug any lighting cable into any lightning port, and it would charge just fine. Yes, this inevitably caused issues with speed as tech progressed and Apple refused to upgrade to new standards. But that refusal also helped them maintain uniformity. Apple also shifted away from hardline data transfers years ago; 99.9% of iPhone users will have iCloud backups happen automatically via wifi, and iCloud means you’re not doing full phone backups every time. You only do the initial backup, then it simply pushes daily changes as you go whenever you connect to wifi. So the actual amount of data that gets transferred is relatively low with day-to-day usage, and it doesn’t eat into your limited call phone data plan. The regular user rarely (if ever) needs to transfer anything via the lightning port, because wireless sync takes care of things as long as they’re on wifi.

The rapid development of USB-C has been great for the tech. But it also means that (as someone who has an iPhone and has very little need for USB-C cables) I’ve bought more USB-C cables in the past two or three years than I have lightning cables. Because my five year old lightning cables are still working fine, while all of my USB-C cables from before the pandemic had to be replaced; Not because they were broken, but simply because newer devices would refuse to charge with them.

Use a product with less shit USB-C ports then?

Literally never had a C port that wasn't as tight as a classic USB

Nowhere near the loosening issues micro and mini had in their times

I'm not defending apple (their upgrades are insane) but it's not the same type of RAM. It's a unified on chip memory that can be accessed way faster than ddr5.

Folding is high on the “neato” scale but isn’t considered a major milestone because it’s really sort of a gimmick and in smartphone terms, is a small niche feature. Most people don’t want a thicker phone that can become a too-small tablet by slowly forming a damage crease down its screen.

and it was 5 years ago at least.

Yeah, I think it says that you have to support USB-C charging. But you can add whatever else you want. And if I remember correctly, macbooks can be charged via C and magsafe already. So all up to snuff

The regulation is the same as for smartphones. In the EU, laptops must charge with USB-C by default. Apple can still include on the laptop a magsafe port which will be useless for the consumer in this area. The easiest to comply for Apple is to put a USB-C to USB-C cable instead of the USB-C to magsafe for Europe.

It's the single charger regulation. In the EU, Apple must use USB-C instead of magsafe for the laptops. It's the same as for smartphones.

They decided on 10 years for lightning and stayed with 10 years.

That’s my whole argument and I thought I made that clear.