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Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

You had me up until the "$10 for every phone sold" bit. Do you seriously believe Apple is happy to willingly sabotage sales of their tens-of-billions cash cow to make a few tens of millions on accessories?

They stuck with 30-pin because it was something their customer base had already bought into, and they didn't want to force a change. They went with Lightning because, let's be honest, micro-USB is shit — every micro-USB device I've owned has had the connector fail within two years. Lightning can handle 12W of power, micro-USB 9W. Lightning is reversible. Lightning has no moving parts on the connector, prone to breaking (or worse) grabbing onto your $700 device with a death grip and bring nigh-unremovable.

It would be great if they switched now to USB-C. They're clearly in the works on that, but didn't want to make a connector change on their phones after only two revs.

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In my recollection a micro-USB has never failed. If it has failed it wasn't an issue because I've a heap of them lying around and could just grab another one.

I have had a number of lightning connectors fail on me. They're designed to fail. Pressure-held copper edge-connectors for devices went out with the Commodore 64's user port.

The fact that it is reversible is convenient but hardly worthy of consideration as a feature alongside "ubiquity" "cost" and "durability".

The old iPhone connector had it's limitations but it was established and really quite solid in my experience. Micro USB perhaps has limited features technically, and is ugly, but I don't believe the advantages that Apple presents for lightning outweigh the drawbacks.

As an interface it has a couple of niche use-cases that it fulfils but it is a step backwards in terms of connector design and in fact has a "worse" connector than the two other interfaces it purports to improve upon.

Props to Apple for padding out their profit margin and all that but they can absolutely go and shite if they think I'm going to swallow their "better connector" bullshit.

And they expect me to use it instead of a headphones jack now as well!

Quick Charge 2.0 via microUSB can throw a lot more power down the wire and charges nice and quickly. Plus that same wire can plug into a USB port on anything and charge.

I'm always surprised by folks talking about failing microUSB ports. The microUSB port on my old G2 (HTC Desire Z) still works fine as does the miniUSB port on my G1 (HTC Dream).

> I'm always surprised by folks talking about failing microUSB ports. The microUSB port on my old G2 (HTC Desire Z) still works fine as does the miniUSB port on my G1 (HTC Dream).

I'm always surprised by folks talking about their non-failing micro-USB ports, as if that somehow discounts other people's devices that have failed.

I don't doubt that some fail. But so many who have had them fail make it seem like the ports are absurdly fragile and fail for everyone all the time.

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