Fair enough. I wonder how the backwards compatibility would have worked with a different brand.
I donāt understand why anyone would defend any manufacturer that complains about this.
Well done for the EU.
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For me the Lightning connectors have been by far the most unreliable I have ever used. In fact I donāt ever remember having to replace a USB cable, whereas the lightning cables for my iPhone have often needed to be binned when the contacts stop working.
Oddly I donāt think there are. Or at least charging points have many connectors. Are news cars using a standard system? Apart from Tesla obviously
Iāve been using iPhones for years and Iāve never had a cable or socket fail. But I have a drawer full of flakey intermittent USB-micro cables, and have had to throw out a couple of devices where the socket itself failed. Weird, eh?
Similarly, I donāt understand why anyone would attack a manufacturer that had used the best connectors available, and that has changed their āstandardsā less often than the industry in general.
Itās not going to be the nirvana you think it is. USB-C is a good standard, but tech moves on. It will change again much faster than we realize.
Really, would you care to back that up with some evidence?
Most other manufacturers follow the USB standard. When the iPhone came out Micro would have been the current spec, now theyāre all on USB-C. I count two.
Just doing a quick sanity check, the first Android phone, the HTC Dream did indeed use USB Micro.
Also, Lightning is proprietary, so from that pov it wasnāt really an option to be considered as a standard for the EU legislation as other manufacturers canāt use it. So whether itās better than USB-C isnāt that relevant as the whole goal was to prevent waste. And they did first ask the manufacturers to sort it out amongst themselves to standardise before they deemed it necessary to legislate.
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When iPhone came out 15 years ago, āUSB-miniā was a more-common āstandardā for many devices, but many phone makers were still using their own proprietary connectors. But yes, mini and now USB-C have been the main (non-Apple) connectors since the launch of other smart-phones 14 years ago. Iāll retract and say that Apple are āno worseā in terms of the frequency of changing the connector type. Everyone is at 2. How many smart phones and cables have we had in the last 14 or 15 years? The criticism that connector types change too frequently does not carry a lot of weight with me.
The proprietary assertion is correct. Apple engineered their own, and IMO theyāve simply been better. Iāve found them to be reliable so donāt care about whether-or-not they are proprietary. Itās just a cable. Micro-USB is just awful in my experience.
But itās better than it was. At its most absurd, Motorola wouldnāt let you charge a flip-phone Razr from your computer without having their app installed. Good luck finding a cable now to charge your Sony.
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Most of my research career was focussed on designing computer based systems to help stroke survivors rehabilitate their speech and language. As most of this population are elderly and many have coexisting disabilities I needed to give them alternative input devices as the keyboard/mouse set up was unusable for them.
The reason why I didnāt use Apple products was their policy of not playing nicely with equipment not made by them. There were and are a plethora of devices that were invaluable for helping this population to use IT but virtually none of them worked with Apple products. If you canāt plug an input device in then the computer is pretty much useless.
Yep. Itās not an issue I experience, but Apple definitely have been reluctant to work hard on interoperability outside their specific devices and other devices licensed into their āwalled gardenā. Whether thatās a good or bad thing perhaps depends on the use-case. But itās good that we have choices.
This is my main issue with Apple products. They havenāt been relucted to work hard on it, they actually appear to be working hard to thwart interoperability, thus taking away their users choices.
Part of the reason I chose Naim is actually because they do provide good interoperability (Chromecast, Airplay, etc.) in their streamers next to their own app/functionality. Giving me the choice of what to use and or combine it with. For me itās important, but I can see how others would care less.
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I donāt try to plug too much into my Apple stuff, but my Roland audio interface is truly plug and play, and all our devices play nice with a Google WiFi mesh. Our Canon printer works fine with our iMac. Our Mini provides suitable output for the DAC in my SuperNait, and a good HDMI interoperability with our Sony TV. Our Apple TV might be the simplest /nicest piece of computer hardware Iāve ever come across in terms of user experience. Itās not connected to any other Apple products at all. I can Bluetooth from my phone to our non-Apple car, and to a Bose speaker. Etcā¦
Like I said, itās a non-issue for us, but your mileage may vary, as they say.
(I will never dip my toe into the nightmare world of the laughably named UPnP streaming, so donāt know about that. Cue people who will come on here and tell me āItās easy, just follow this six pages of complex instructions and youāll be all setā.)
Charging points for cars are actually largely standardised now and even Tesla accept that their owners may need to charge their cars from non-Tesla chargers and so supply their owners with a cable with the right connector. The market for Tesla/everyone else adapters has reportedly bombed!
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