Lighting’s connector itself is great - cables should absolutely be male and USB messed up in that regard. The locking mechanism is also far superior, and overall I’ve had 4 USB C ports fail, 2 due to the locking mechanism and 2 due to the inner male part of the port breaking - these are issues far less with lightning.
That said, the restrictive data speeds and restriction on who can use it, both of which are down to apple, do have a hit on it.
If it was possible to do something along the lines of USB 3.2 (which it should be as USB A manages it with 5 pins vs lightning’s 8/16) over a lightning connector that’d be way better than USB C but you can’t really force apple to give everyone else a proprietary component
Type C can’t be similar to lightning wrt the advantages you’re describing because apple prevents it through patents. So you can thank apple for a worse type c design than necessary.
All the USB family have both male and female aspects in both the connectors and ports though which is just asking for things to get broken as the male parts get smaller.
Apple doesn’t own the rights to either male or reversible connectors, so it was seemingly just a design decision to make something flimsy, which only looks robust when you look at it next to micro USB… Even a trrs like connector with 5 pins rather than 4 would’ve been better than what they came up with for durability at least, although shielding would have to be better on insertion/removal
I’m not sure. I haven’t looked into this, but it might be that the USB controller sits on the SoC. Non-Pro iPhone 15 uses the same SoC as the 14 Pro. To get USB 3 speeds you need to re-engineer the SoC, which adds a huge amount of cost. I expect the iPhone 16 to have USB 3 across the board.
Lighting’s connector itself is great - cables should absolutely be male and USB messed up in that regard. The locking mechanism is also far superior, and overall I’ve had 4 USB C ports fail, 2 due to the locking mechanism and 2 due to the inner male part of the port breaking - these are issues far less with lightning.
That said, the restrictive data speeds and restriction on who can use it, both of which are down to apple, do have a hit on it.
If it was possible to do something along the lines of USB 3.2 (which it should be as USB A manages it with 5 pins vs lightning’s 8/16) over a lightning connector that’d be way better than USB C but you can’t really force apple to give everyone else a proprietary component
Type C can’t be similar to lightning wrt the advantages you’re describing because apple prevents it through patents. So you can thank apple for a worse type c design than necessary.
All the USB family have both male and female aspects in both the connectors and ports though which is just asking for things to get broken as the male parts get smaller.
Apple doesn’t own the rights to either male or reversible connectors, so it was seemingly just a design decision to make something flimsy, which only looks robust when you look at it next to micro USB… Even a trrs like connector with 5 pins rather than 4 would’ve been better than what they came up with for durability at least, although shielding would have to be better on insertion/removal
the iPhone 15 still only supports USB 2.0 speeds over the USB-C port. only the Pro models get bumped up to USB3.
Exactly, that just evidences that it’s Apple under Tim Cook that’s bad, not Lightning as a port
I’m not sure. I haven’t looked into this, but it might be that the USB controller sits on the SoC. Non-Pro iPhone 15 uses the same SoC as the 14 Pro. To get USB 3 speeds you need to re-engineer the SoC, which adds a huge amount of cost. I expect the iPhone 16 to have USB 3 across the board.
That’s correct.