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
This is business 101.
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.
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?
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.
It's striking, iPhones have always been top except for charging. They were always dead cause the cables were so unreliable and difficult to find. Finally that's fixed, rare thanks to the EU.
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.
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.
didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"
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.
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?
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.
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.
