This has absolutely zero to do with the plug design of Lightning. There are crap cables for USB-A, USB-C, USB Micro, 3.5" audio, and any other standard you want to find that don't last.
> And that's not even considering how a little bit of dust can prevent your device from charging at all, and lightning ports are a complete dust magnet.
By what magic do you believe that lightning ports collect pocket lint that USB-C is immune to?
> But the best argument against "what about lightning?" is the fact that Apple themselves don't use it on their higher powered devices like macs, and use USB-C instead.
Nobody is making this point. They're saying the sheer existence of the Lightning plug lit a fire under the USB-IF to finish and greenlight USB-C. If Apple hadn't started producing Lightning devices, it's entirely possible we'd still be dealing with USB Micro.
That said, I'll happily die on the hill that the Lightning plug design is almost unilaterally superior to the USB-C plug design.
Lightning cables don't last. They are a complete disaster. And that's not even considering how a little bit of dust can prevent your device from charging at all, and lightning ports are a complete dust magnet.
But the best argument against "what about lightning?" is the fact that Apple themselves don't use it on their higher powered devices like macs, and use USB-C instead.
I disagree and think the USB-C connector is better designed.
Exposing electrical contacts to the environment like on the Lightning connector is bad for several reasons, including increased risk of static electricity damage and wear on the exposed electrical contacts. Apple has gone to great lengths to reduce or eliminate the static electricity risk by integrating a special IC into the cable. The contact wear issue has not been addressed by them. Many of the cables I have show signs of eroded contacts and I think that is the main reason why some cables of mine have failed.
The USB-C connector surrounds the contacts with a mechanical shield that protects them from fingers or anything else. This is a standard connector design that has been used on pretty much every connector. It is boring, but it works.
The Lightning is great engineering, but is ultimately let down by the radical design IMHO.
BTW, I am also an electrical engineer that has designed MFI accessories and uses iPhones.
> What's Apple reasoning for not abandoning Lightning for USB-C on their phones?
I can think of 3 reasons:
1. A lightning port is slightly smaller than USB-c, so it enable Apple to keep their phone slimmer than the competition in theory.
2. Apple loves to be in control of everything. With lightning, they could make a switch to a "lightning 2.O" cable / port whenever they so pleased. With USB-C they would be restricted by the USB-IF.
3. They can sell more cable and licensing fees this way. With USB-C, everyone will be able to buy a better and cheaper cable than the Apple ones, and Apple won't receive even a cent from them.
Lightning is the better-engineered physical connector. Quite-heavy phones can be held up on a charging cradle with 100% of the load placed on the Lightning connector, while this would destroy a USB-C connector. A Lightning jack is a solid piece of aluminum, plus two plastic bits on either side with wires running up them. It's simple and robust. The socket is equally simple.
USB-C — all of the USBs, really — give unneeded opportunity to catch debris inside the connectors and then force said debris into the slots, gumming it up. Lightning avoids this; the jack is designed to be completely flat+smooth+convex, so no debris collects on/in it.
The only reason USB-C doesn't just use a Lightning connector is spite. IIRC, Apple offered the USB Forum the Lightning connector patents if they wanted them, but they refused. Instead, the USB Forum copied what they considered the desirable features of Lightning — e.g. reversibility; but implemented them worse (with non-mirrored sense pins requiring USB PHYs to understand orientation); and then sought extra trouble trying to solve problems that people provably hadn't been having with Lightning (e.g. re-adding a shroud for the pins — presumably to protect from scratches/rust — when nobody has ever had a Lightning cable fail for this reason; where this design choice increased the failure rate of USB-C sockets. The cables are supposed to have the sacrificial side of the connection!)
> Of course lightning was better still but alas Apple wasn't going to share that with the world so we have USB C.
Apple was a major contributor to the Type C design, and learning from the limitations of lighting were reflected in its design.
Like you I really like the small profile of lightning, but the design of the Type C connector does have two important advantages thanks to its shell/shroud design:
1 - The "springy" piece that deforms is the cable not the receptacle. That means when the connection becomes flimsy this is more likely to be the replaceable cables (though some of the cables can be pricy, it's likely still cheaper than replacing the device)
2 - the shroud is ground and is longer than the pins, thus you have a ground connection before you get to any signal or power (like the longer ground pin in UK and Schuko connectors. This doesn't matter much for a USB2 cable but is a safety issue when you have 100W on the cable.
And back to Apple: much as lightning is good for them, it isn't really an instrument of MFI enforcement; they can enforce that just as well with type C. They already have type C iPads so I expect they'll gradually abandon lightning. The iPod 30-pin connector lasted about 9 years and lightning is 7 years old so this isn't unreasonable. And I believe it would make the EU happy.
> Perhaps the "benefit" you describe is only relevant because the proprietary Apple cable design is so poor?
No, the lightning connector's design is actually less prone to snapping than USB type c. Whether or not that it is an advantage is subjective, given that cables are inexpensive and the devices they're attached to generally are not.
In my opinion lightning is a vastly superior connector to USB-C. It's easier to insert and it's more robust and doesn't present issue if you do need to remove a snapped connector as was mentioned in the parent comment.
In an ideal world, Apple handed off the lightning connector off to the USB consortium and that turned into the type c connector. I don't know if there are physical limitations that would ultimately limit lightning, which has only ever gone as high as USB 3 speeds, but as far as using it on devices that I'm plugging and unplugging, it's much nicer.
As it is in the real world, it's a dead end and I am eagerly waiting to get rid of lightning so I can use one connector for all my portable devices.
Well nothing is indestructible. My point is that it is a well-designed connector, and in some ways superior to USB-C. Lightning was introduced in 2012 before USB-C was commonplace. It makes sense that once Apple decided to use it, they would be hesitant to move away from it.
To be fair I've maintained for a while now that the reason Apple uses lightning on the phones is because it's quite frankly much more durable than USB-C.
Lightning was a design put forth by a company that wasn't Apple during the USB IF's design stage of USB-C. It was rejected because the pins were on the outside, not the inside, and would allow easy damage of both the cable and the connector. It was rejected purely on completely sane technical and mechanical reasons.
Apple shipped it anyways, and all Lightning cables have failed or will fail for exactly the reasons it was rejected. Apple chose the cable because of how easily it fails.
Lightning was never good, and Apple has a long history of fucking customers, period.
If you're just going to declare all of that to be factual, what response should anyone give? If there is "no improvement, none whatsoever" then obviously Lightning should win! But that's not the case at all.
Lightning places the springs inside the port, instead of on the cable. So, when the springs wear out, you need a new phone instead of a new cable.
Lightning directly exposes the pins on the cable to the environment and corrosion, which is not a better design for durability and longevity.
I have no idea where you're getting the idea that USB-C is more fragile than Lightning. It isn't, although this seems to be a persistent belief. All evidence I've seen points to the opposite conclusion, at least as far as the port is concerned, and everyone should care a lot more about the port than the cable. Ports are much more expensive to replace than cables. We're also not talking about the flimsy microUSB connector, which was rife with problems.
The USB-C port has also been repeatedly proven to be small enough to fit into the current crop of iPhones, so why does the minuscule difference in size matter? It isn't the limiting factor for anything.
But, none of that really matters. What matters is that approximately all of my other devices use USB-C, but I have to either carry around a Lightning cable or a wireless charger just for my phone. Why? It's incredibly annoying to need yet another type of cable, and Lightning isn't better at anything. If Lightning was so much better, Apple should have pushed for it to become the standard instead of USB-C, as Apple has been part of the USB-IF for a very long time, and Apple would have used it on their laptops instead of USB-C... but they didn't do either of those things. Even Apple is moving away from Lightning, first on their iPads, but it is clear they're going to do this across the board over time.
Even worse, Lightning is limited to USB 2.0 speeds on iPhone. Apple introduces iPhones with a terabyte of storage and the ability to record massive 4k ProRes video files... but how are you supposed to get those multi-gigabyte files onto a computer for editing? Lightning at slower-than-WiFi speeds? WiFi at 600Mbps instead of USB-C at 10Gbps? None of it makes any sense.
It is way past time for Apple to switch the iPhone to USB-C, but it apparently won't happen until next year.
“Why doesn’t Apple just get rid of Lightning and use USB-C on their iPhones!”
This is why. Ignoring the momentum Lightning had from being a few years older, this is a great reason not to switch.
Sadly I know this has become a big problem for people on the new Macs. Plug a USB-C hub in? Now that port doesn’t do Thunderbolt or Display Port. How do you know that? Trial and error.
> There's a long history of Apple using proprietary connectors to achieve performance specifications above what the currently available standardized connectors could provide.
Lightning was good when it came out (compared to the various micro-USB options), but it's not held up. Even Apple knows this and they've moved away from it on their iPads.
I guess that's kind of subjective. Personally I'm anti USB-C from a durability standpoint. USB-C is designed to fail on the device-side, whereas lighting and microUSB are designed to fail on the cable side. So I see all devices using USB-C as throwaways because the port will fail.
If Apple gets rid of lightning they lose their durability advantage vs competitors by using a poorly designed connector.
> This is, after all, the company that developed the Lightening connector and sticks on its iPhones to it despite the whole industry shifting to USB-C.
There is a rumor that Apple developed USB-C and donated it to the USB-IF [1]. Apple was also one of the first users of USB-C when they introduced the 12" MacBook in 2015.
Since then they've continuously grown their adoption of USB-C, first in the MacBook Pro in 2016, then in the iMac and iMac Pro in 2017, the iPad Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini in 2018 and most recently in the Mac Pro in 2019. In fact nowadays the only Apple devices still not featuring USB-C are the iPhone and the (non-Pro) iPads.
There are probably good reasons why Apple hasn't replaced Lightning with USB-C for the iPhone and iPad yet. If they replace Lightning with USB-C now, the whole 3rd-party accessory ecosystem has to adapt to that. While that's probably fine, if the rumors are true that Apple plans to remove all physical ports from iPhones [2] next year, that would result in USB-C equipped iPhones/iPads only being sold for 2-3 years, before there is another interface again. So Apples thinking is probably that it's more customer friendly to stick to Lightning until they replace it with a wireless solution and I'd agree with such an assessment.
>can’t use the new style of usb-c cable with an old style adapter
Lightning has been out for 9 years now and they’re still using it. If you’ve bought anything mobile from apple you’ve got one of the usb-a to lightning cables.
I think another good argument for phones is that it's surely much easier to clean lint out of a lightning port than a USB C port.
Edit: But probably, I'd guess, right now the main reason Apple has stuck to lightning to whatever extent it is is because it's more convenient for its customers. USB C is already the standard, and Apple would benefit from switching to USB C across its product line if its customers would like that more.
gestures wildly at every other Apple products that switched over
Apple said from the start of Lightning (which was and is heads and shoulders above micro-USB) that they planned for it to last as long as the 30-pin connector and it did. People complained when we went from 30-pin to Lightning and they complained when Apple went from Lightning to USB-C.
As a tech nerd I wish they had moved the phone (or at least the Pro version) to USB-C sooner but I understand why they didn’t. You all act like we had to be “saved from Lightning”, regular people don’t care, they liked Lightning, I liked Lightning. Micro-USB is trash, I can see wanting to escape that hell, Lightning wasn’t a problem for the vast majority of people.
And before “but they made money off MFI”, I don’t care. It was a drop in the bucket revenue-wise for them and meant that your Lightning cables has a minimum standard they would be held to. Something I can’t say for my other cables.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply are unaware of the physical realities (re: limitations) of micro USB and not actively trying to mislead but here’s a real anecdote from someone who routinely repaired micro USB and lightning devices:
Micro USB ports failed considerably faster and more often than lightning. Easily by a margin of 100:1. the design of the “cage” that held the male connector would wear out, the thin center plastic would break, etc. Micro USB was and still is complete garbage.
Apple engineers knew this and thankfully put in the effort to make something better.
The rest of the industry was still trying to pull their head out of their ass and apple had this awesome durable new connector. That’s what really happened.
Now, years later people like you have either forgotten or I guess maybe never saw the comparison up close for prolonged periods but it tires me to see this careless and ignorant argument brought up time and time again.
Counterpoint: The lightning port has both the locking spring tabs as well as the spring contacts in the receptacle, both of which wear out over time.
I'd much rather replace a cable due to worn out springs than my phone's port.
Now why is Apple holding onto Lightning for iPhones when even the iPad has been transitioned to USB-C? I like the theory that Apple is trying to keep it until they can make an entirely wireless iPhone happen, but the failure of AirPower [1] was likely a factor in delaying this transition further than planned.
This has absolutely zero to do with the plug design of Lightning. There are crap cables for USB-A, USB-C, USB Micro, 3.5" audio, and any other standard you want to find that don't last.
> And that's not even considering how a little bit of dust can prevent your device from charging at all, and lightning ports are a complete dust magnet.
By what magic do you believe that lightning ports collect pocket lint that USB-C is immune to?
> But the best argument against "what about lightning?" is the fact that Apple themselves don't use it on their higher powered devices like macs, and use USB-C instead.
Nobody is making this point. They're saying the sheer existence of the Lightning plug lit a fire under the USB-IF to finish and greenlight USB-C. If Apple hadn't started producing Lightning devices, it's entirely possible we'd still be dealing with USB Micro.
That said, I'll happily die on the hill that the Lightning plug design is almost unilaterally superior to the USB-C plug design.
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