Hacker News Reader

Comment by ydnaclementine | Hacker News Reader

Pretty sure that's a lightning port on the bottom unfortunately. Waiting for usb-c like the ipads

Lighting is a much firmer connector from what I've experienced. The latency on audio is also miles better if you do music. I returned an ipad with USB-C - unusable.

I've heard that USB C is inferior too but shouldn't this be a settled issue one way or the other ( whether Lightning is superior or USB C is superior ) especially on HN. Either it is or it isn't. Charging is way too important to be left to the whims of some European regulator looking to penalize Apple. I have no preference in the matter and just want something that is superior in performance.

All I've seen on this matter is these kinds of videos on it

  USB-C is TRASH
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXO0LtDvt-M

I can't speak to Lightning, since other than my macbook we're a non-apple household, but USB-C has been a game-changer as far as cable management in our house. Between chargers that negotiate the right amount of charging, and having cables that work on all of the laptops/chromebooks/phones, its orders of magnitude better than micro-usb was. (The only problem I know of is that fast-charging depends on your cords.)

I'd much rather have a less-optimal phone charging cord + port (usb-c) that lets me use any of my five accessible chargers than have to sit down and recognize which cord works with which device, or negotiate with my wife or kids over the (fewer) phone-only cords. :)

I think the EU mandated micro USB before - which was really bad. I was glad that Apple just did the extra dongle or whatever instead of switching everything to that crap.

USB-C is better than micro-usb. That said, if you do audio mixing, if you do a ton of cycle on a charger, lightning is just clearly better. The USB standard has a little plastic thing in the middle of the hole this fatigues. Apple offered lighting but I know folks just didn't want to do the standard because it would be adminiting that their micro-usb standard was not as good. They did copy a lot of lighting with USB C however (reversible connector etc).

Do you have a source? I’m interested in reading more about this.

Sure. USB's port has a little tab inside, I think its like 0.6mm. Because they put a TON of pins on this little tab (24 pins!) the tab itself in almost all cases has to be plastic or non-metal.

Lighting by contrast tends to have a metal tab which is relatively beefy at 1.5mm. This is much stronger materials and dimensions wise AND is on a part (the cable) that is pretty easily replaceable. So that's a win win win.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_(connector)#/media/F...

Despite this, the port itself is SMALLER for lighting. So add another win?

Finally with lightning the interface is simple, it's one piece inside another and the tolerances seem really good / there is an little indent to help seat a lightning cable. With UCB-C you have a shall going around a tab, so loading is onto the interior surface with flexing, then a shall around that, so tab -> surrounded by cable shell -> surrounded by port shell. In my experience this just results in a fair bit of slop in accumulated tolerance issues.

Even if/when they do introduce usb-c on iPhones, it will start with the high end models not the SE. The regular iPad doesn't have usb-c either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com