I'd honestly love to use my laptop's Ethernet dongle with my iPad or iPhone, but that won't happen. Apple has just recently doubled down on Lightning with the Apple TV Remote, the iPhone 7 headphones and the new Magic Trackpad/Mouse/Keyboard trio. For iPad accessories, they've even introduced the all-new Smart Connector instead of a USB-C port on the side of the iPad.
> ... they don't want you plugging much of anything into these ...
Apple have always sold docking dongles to support arbitrary things, generally video out and audio out (or combo e.g. HDMI), and a charger in. When not Apple, their accessory proxy, Belkin, has you covered generally at or before launch.
Of course they also support both memory card dongle and most importantly (contrary to your assertion) they sell a first party generic USB-A dongle, and the iPad does good things (same things as a Mac) when you plug a camera or external storage in so accessories are supported by code path too.
> Forcing the connection through wifi means they have much, much more control ...
In fact, you can even plug in a generic TP-Link USB-C Ethernet and that works, taking priority over WiFi, and running at gigabit Ethernet speeds.
Btw, highly recommend using these wired Ethernet connections when migrating from old iPad to new using iPad-to-iPad transfer (fastest, gets you done, so you don't rely on WiFi to bring everything down). You can do this with iPhones too. If you need to sync mass amounts of iCloud files or Photos, a wired Ethernet dongle also makes a huge difference due less to bandwidth and more to reduced latency on the sync chatter.
Yeah, I find this quite bizarre. For the phones and iPads, this also goes. I assume that only a minority of iOS device buyers has a MBP, but it's quite strange to unpack your phone and realize you can't hook it up to your MBP.
Because otherwise you cannot use your iPhone with your Macbook. It's the most senseless oversight I have seen in years. In order to turn on WiFi sync between iTunes on your Macbook and your iPhone, you need to have it plugged in at least once. You cannot plug it in though, because there is no compatible USB-C to Lightning cable from Apple. D'oh.
I was mostly thinking about Macs at the time I made the joke, because very often an iOS user is also a Mac user. Where I work, Mac users always have to carry around dongles.
It would be interesting if Cisco will take advantage of this in any way to allow the control of their networking devices. Not that it's too hard to plug in with an old laptop, but still, the iPad is convenient.
It's a little confusing to me why Apple makes it so hard for people to use their devices in customer specific ways like this cable. I read a while back that TV networks like CNN and ESPN were using iPads to control on-air graphics in near real time. They're huge companies they can afford the custom engineering to jailbreak the devices and to write custom apps. But why doesn't Apple make it easier for everyone else?
sometimes you want to not only charge but also pass data via cable to macbook. Wifi has latency, airpods bluetooth also has latency.
It the past it was easy when you could still connect iphone/ipad to macbook via cable and still connect headset for mic and speakers. I tested a lot of splitter adapters and they allowed only to use headset speakers (no mic) and charge (no data)
On the USB-A port thing, what reason does anyone have for plugging their phone into their computer anymore, though? Everything about iOS and macOS now supports wireless sync and file transfer. I can't think of a single thing that I'd even need that for...
Only have to do this because the accessory kit in iOS is so locked down and Apple wraps that mess up in their "Works for iPhone" program.
The dock connector has full serial bus for accessories with power. It's easy to program and build accessories. No weird hacks converting to analog and then doing software signal processing and generating power with continuous tone.
Apple just locks it down from developers getting access unless you follow their strict guidelines. One of which is that your accessory works for iPhone and only iPhone and not multiple devices. They also have licensing fees involved. It's arbitrary.
The also do this same program for Bluetooth. They claimed custom protocols at WWDC a few years ago that gave me hope I could connect to common bluetooth devices (like a laptops and my Lego NXT device). Entirely not the case.
Essentially everything in my home and office is an Apple product, but it is rather surreal that this isn't already a baked-in option on Apple laptops in the year of our lord 2023. I think an employer first handed me a mobile plug-in card for my laptop in about 2007, which worked surprisingly really well given the technology of that long-ago era. Given that this is a company that is one of the dominant players in phones and that they long ago put the same technology in iPads, it just seems like a huge oversight.
To program iPhone apps. AFAIK, Until the recent Xcode beta you couldn't push code wirelessly to your iPhone, and even now the feature in the Xcode beta is pretty slow. Also I enjoy charging my iPhone with my macs. For a company that takes pride in seamless connectivity within their ecosystem I find it surprising that you cannot buy an iPhone + MacBook Pro and connect them without adapters.
I'd honestly love to use my laptop's Ethernet dongle with my iPad or iPhone, but that won't happen. Apple has just recently doubled down on Lightning with the Apple TV Remote, the iPhone 7 headphones and the new Magic Trackpad/Mouse/Keyboard trio. For iPad accessories, they've even introduced the all-new Smart Connector instead of a USB-C port on the side of the iPad.
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