Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users.
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.
I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector.
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
That was hilarious, as though Lightning cables on average outlasted the devices they were used with. Meanwhile in the real world, Apple’s delicate “strain relief” started to fray and tear in 6-12 months of use, and thanks to their weird unnecessary DRM chip for MFi enforcement, third-party Lightning cables tended to become flaky for purely DRM reasons in a few months.
Show me anyone who had more than a couple of working Lightning cables left when they eliminated their last Lightning device.
There are many things they do which Apple argues benefits their users, but end up benefitting themselves in suspiciously manipulative ways.
I'm not shocked they entered a 10 year contractual agreement, and that just so happened to allow them to make a lot of profit by using a proprietary cable.
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 also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that.
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.
That's not right. They were an early investor in ARM Ltd., but they in no way "helped develop ARM". That was all Acorn. ARM Ltd was created because Apple thought ARM was a good fit for the Newton, but didn't want to be beholden to a competitor, which Acorn was.
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.
> Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple?
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.
Since people are getting very fixated on Apple's success and how they dominated all the previous European phone manufacturers, let me state it clearly, they're a monopoly and must be regulated, but you regulate a market by setting up market rules, not by chasing individual companies.
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.
> you regulate a market by setting up market rules, not by chasing individual companies
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?
I think it is wrong to force Apple to support various "open standards". Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.
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.
> Other device manufacturers should make better devices and have people switch naturally to them because they are better.
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.
I compare iPhones with Samsung flagships such as the S line.
Tge iPhones are simply better made: they don’t feel light or plasticky, the UI on Android is way worse compared to iOS and so on.
And the whole SMS thing is just ridiculous: iMessage and SMS are two differrent things, hence they are highlighted with different colors so you know you can’t send pictures via SMS and most likely you have to switch to other apps such as Whatsapp, FB Messenger, Telegram and others. It does not mean you have to buy an iPhone to talk to your friends that prefer Apple products.
probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device
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)
LIghtning due to its DRM chips (and the delicateness of Apple’s “aesthetics-first” first-party cables) was not a long-lived cable. We threw away probably 2-3 per year during the whole era. Throwing away the last couple before their natural death, when I finally eradicated Lightning from our home, was no great loss.
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
Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.
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.
They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
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.
Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?
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
Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for.
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.
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽
Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.
The video dongles never worked reliably, especially early on. The USB-A adapters were less bad but still annoying. The end result was that everyone bought docks. Same as how removing jack didn't result in people using dongles, they bought AirPods.
No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.
I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.
>iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
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.
Their own cables were the most fragile things ever invented. There's no reason for that other than selling more cables. And it's not just about revenue, it's about control/lockin.
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.
Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.
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 is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. 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.
> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime.
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.
I did wind up replacing the USB C ports on a 4 year old computer recently because it was dodgy as hell. When i got it under the microscope it the longer bus power pin contacts (and one or two of the others) had been badly worn/squished/stretched in a way that I guess was causing them to bridge to other pins. I assume some USB-C cable had some gunk in the connector which was hard enough to damage the contacts on the center blade, and the user didn't notice (because how often do you look into the end of your USB-C cable?). It probably presented as a cable that wasn't seating right or didn't go all the way in and whatever was inside probably fell out when it was removed and they tried again.
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.
I've had multiple USB-C chargers broken like this.
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.)
I have seen multiple USB-C ports break on Lenovo and HP laptops. About 1 in every 50 laptops over the span of 2-3 years. I don't know if it was the users fault or a manufacturing issue. But the manufacturers fixed these under the extended warranty.
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.
At the same time, if the springs on the iPhone-side connector loosen and can't hold onto the cable, you have to replace the whole phone and not just the cable.
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.
My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface.
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.
I find it's often lint in the USB-C port. Cleaning it out with a non-conductive tool like a toothpick or a dry toothbrush usually solves it for me when that happenens.
I've had dozens of devices with USB-C. I've yet to have even a single one that had any problems with them. To be fair, I'm using iPhones mostly for app testing, so I also had very few issues with them.
Your Pixel 8 could be about two years old. The connector performed way under spec and you should send it in for repair (assuming your are in a country with a 2 year warranty period)
This is probably lint buildup. You can scrape it out with any thin and stiff object like a safety pin.
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.
My experience is that plugs from the same manufacturer as the device tend to keep holding tightly, but mixing makers is unreliable. Apple plugs in particular tend to slide out of my samsung phone really easily. I guess whoever speced usbc didn't bother with the details of how it would stay in, and every manufacturer figured out their own solution.
The 10K cycle insertion rating for USB-C is an idealized metric that does not include lateral force, torque, device movement, or real-world wear patterns. These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
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.
> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
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.
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
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.
Incorrect. You want springy bits on part that is easily replaceable - the cable. USB-C does that, the springy bits are in the connector, not the socket.
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".
Well sure, they're iterating between models. But in many cases they're quite literally copy/pasting designs. Any imagined separation between the hardware teams is fantasy based. The comment I replied to is nonsensical.
"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.
Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial
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.
>> 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?
They openly said why, millions upon millions of devices (speakers etc) people wanted to use with lightning connectors. There was never a good time and EU putting a deadline on it gets Apple free of the e-waste accusations.
No one was accusing Apple of e-waste when for decades the world had decided common standards were a great way to reduce e-waste.
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.
Really? Do you remember the user shit storm when they dumped the dock connector and went to lightning? People wouldn’t shut up for years, even though lightning was way way better.
So, your position is that some users whined about that… so what? Apple knew those users were, quite frankly, wrong, the 30-pin was fragile and one-way. And the cables themselves were never expensive, and used scarcely more resources than many disposable items we throw out every day.
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!
I think this whole narrative being spun here that Good Guy Apple was Being Oppressed by the lowly end users & wanted to do the right thing (be thrown into the briar patch) all along, just never could form the political will for it and needed EU intervention is some insane fucking weird ass made up nonsense. WTF wtf wtf? Surely you must be joking.
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 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.
The MBP would only be an example if they were scared of being too new to USB-C on phones. That stopped being possible once a quarter of new phones were USB-C. So they weren't scared of that.
Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change.
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.
> In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector
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.
Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018.
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.
Two devices that sold absolutely minuscule numbers are not remotely relevant to this discussion. For non-Apple smartphone users, the overwhelming majority were rocking the atrocious trash that is micro USB half a decade after the iPhone moved to lightning.
Don't forget the USB 3.0 micro-B on the Galaxy S2, the 18-pin connector, the 20-pin connector, mini-USB and various barrel connectors. USB-C was a blessing for Samsung, they could finally ditch their sub-par connectors.
I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer).
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.
My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device.
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.
This was a common trope on Reddit but makes literally zero sense. There are a ton of wired accessories that this would make completely useless overnight, including things like CarPlay.
You probably viewed this as a common trope because you were not aware of the actual source of the rumors. No, these are not claims are not from reddit, they're from Mark Gurman in 2018.
> 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]
Mark Gurman’s track record with Apple is spotty at best. He may have been the original source of the rumor, but Reddit’s enormously anti-Apple user base is more than happy to grab onto any notion that Apple might do something even slightly unpopular and run wild. One dude with one report and middling accuracy does not a reliable narrative make, no matter how many times it’s reposted.
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.
This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?
This is a silly reason to hold back if that was their plan. You can buy, for $20 and up, little USB-sticks that allow wired-CarPlay cars to do wireless CarPlay. Apple could manufacture 100 million of those, at a cost of $5 for the boards and maybe $8 in glass and aluminum, and sell them at a huge profit for $79.99 and advertise them as a revolutionary breakthrough they invented.
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.
So can you also do 10Gbps data transfers wirelessly like the iPhone Pros do? Can I just plug up my phone to any old monitor with a USB C port or use a standard video cord?
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.
I didn’t say there were no reasons that smart/pro customers should dread a portless phone and appreciate the port. Of course there are reasons!
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.
Compared to 40 minutes for a charge? Have you used wireless CarPlay? There is a noticeable delay from pressing a button on the display in your car and your phone reacting.
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?
Sure after plugging in an USB-C extender, an USB-C to headphone adapter and an USB-C to HDMI adapter. I'm sure that will be as convenient as a phone, that directly has these interfaces. At that point you could even design the phone without any port and buy a Bluetooth to USB-C adapter instead.
- Ethernet - I have to do the same for every MacBook for the past decade - use an adapter. The iPhone can use the same adapter.
- 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
Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17.
Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable.
Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass.
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
Do you have any source that states that Apple was forced? Given that they switched the iPhone to USB-C multiple product iterations before it was required makes it seem to be that they were not forced.
