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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells a USB-C to Lightning cable, so you don't need a dongle to connect an iPhone.

The rest of your points stand though.

For €5000 you can't connect your state-of-the-art iPhone to your state-of-the-art Mac out of the box. You have to pay extra, and you have to carry around an awkward dongle adapter and hope you don't forget it! Fucking lol.

> you have to carry around an awkward dongle adapter

Huh? It's not a dongle, it's just a cable. You do need a cable to connect your phone to your laptop.

But that's not a cable that everyone has everywhere.

So many times around me poor iPhone owners couldn't charge their phones at parties because nobody had their kind of cable around, while for microUSB you've got plenty of helpful charger and powerbank owners.

To be honest, lately owners of phones with USB-C were having the same problem, but I guess it's gonna change faster than with Lightning cables.

It isn't a dongle adapter, it is a usb cable with usb-c on one side and lightning on the other.

A cable of rather limited uses is the moral equivalent of a dongle.

Except that it increases utility.

I can now bring a single charger that can charge my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. I just need a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to Lightning cable.

Charge my laptop or charge my iPhone or charge both (use the laptop as a passthrough).

It will reduce the amount of stuff I carry, I tend to carry just an iPhone charger while traveling in case I want to bring it with me where I don't bring my laptop, extra space in luggage and weight.

Can you plug this particular cable into a wall adapter iOS charger? If not, then you still need two different cables depending on whether you want to charge from the wall or the mac.

You can't plug it into the wall adapter iOS charger, but you can plug it into a USB-C charger that comes with the MBP.

Increases utility over what? If the ports all match, you can choose to carry 1 or 2 cables depending on whether you want to make 1 or 2 connections. Since the ports don't match, you need a cable for each type of connection you might want to make.

It is just another cable\dongle\adapter\hub we must buy again and again. These products should "just work" together.

Ok, great. Then let's all go back to 2001 and use 10Mbps first-generation USB for everything. Oops! It won't supply enough power, it's now FOUR THOUSAND times slower than modern interfaces, it can't drive monitors, etc.

Maybe your idea isn't so great.

Have fun playing with your dongles

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