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Comment by Sir_Cmpwn | Hacker News Reader

Lightning, sure. How about firewire, and thunderbolt, and the 30-pin connectors for the iPod? Have you also forgotten their proprietary SSD connectors - SATA compatible but with a non-M.2 socket. Or ADC, a proprietary pinout for what's effectively a DVI cable? Or AAUI? Mini-VGA and Mini-DVI?

Apple has been doing this for longer than I've been alive. I'm happy that they're phasing it out in favor of USB-C - this is a positive step - but their past definitely helps damns them when fanboys come to their defense over right to repair.

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> firewire

FireWire was very much standardised (IEEE 1394), and was co-developed by other companies. It wasn’t some obscure thing that only existed on Apple stuff. They also haven’t shipped a computer with FireWire in about six years I think?

> thunderbolt

Again, Thunderbolt isn’t even a primarily Apple-developed technology, it’s Intel. Plenty of computers ship with Thunderbolt 3 ports today, and a couple of years ago Intel dropped the royalty that used to be required.

> proprietary SSD connectors

Agreed that this one sucks.

> 30-pin connectors for the iPod, ADC, AAUI, Mini-VGA, Mini DVI

Nothing on that list has shipped for years, in some cases decades. The comment I replied to says they do this “in new devices”, but that is just not the case and hasn’t been for a good while now.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending their practices over repair. I strongly disagree with their actions to politically extinguish the types of law that would force them to make it easier for people to repair their stuff.

To my knowledge those described have some distinct advantage over what was available on the market at the time. Firewire was way faster, ADC carries USB, Thunderbolt is connected to PCIe, mini-vga and mini-dvi are self explanatory and their proprietary SATA like connection was, again, way faster.

Their proprietary SATA was just SATA with a wrong connector. It was not faster. Firewire was faster at the expense of massive security holes. A practical reason for having Thunderbolt connected to PCIe never materialized. Don't kid yourself - Apple made these calls for one reason and one reason only.

There are external GPUs now that use thunderbolt, prior to this you could run external displays at a greater resolution than was available via HDMI at the time.

Firewire was mostly not used because people were content to endure USB, and USB had a larger availability on consumer hardware. Apple gained nothing by spending money to add the port to their computers so I find it hard to buy that they had a secret malevolent purpose in doing so. In this case they rolled the dice on a superior solution and it didn’t pay off.

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