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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> The physical connector is terrible and ends up being the first thing to break on a lot of electronics.

The USB consortium already botched that badly with mini-A, so learned from that in the design of micro-A and then C. C was also influenced heavily by Apple's experience with lightning (Apple is a core member of the USB Consortium).

The physical part of type C is quite good: the nice grounding shell (preferable IMHO to lightning) high frequency design, and most importantly (per your comment) failure is mostly directed to the cable, not the jack (one of mini-A's problems) since a bad cable can be replaced while a damaged jack these days means replacing the device.

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I meant the jack. I know a lot of people that try to use their phones for 3+ years and I get my own phones used from a friend I know that owns a shop that does phone repairs. Maybe I don’t have a big enough sample, so it’s too subjective, but the jack fails plenty based on what I see in my social circle.

AFAIK the Essential phone was brutal for jack failures. My friend (repair shop owner) gave me an LG V60 this year and basically said it’ll be great until the USB-C port wears out.

My newest iPad with USB-C seems like the jack is already flaky while old iPads with lightning ports are all good even with the abuse they have to endure from kids they were handed down to.

I have so little faith in USB-C ports that I’ve started trying to buy magnetic adapters for all my stuff.

People break the stupid wafer trying to clean them.

They suck IMO.

One of my favorite little features of the M1 MacBook is that the charging cable is only connected by contact enforced by magnets so that there isn't even a jack that can be damaged. Pulling on the charging cable simply breaks the connection.

MagSafe is great, but it's been around since 2006

Sadly it's patented so no one else could implement in their laptop.

It’s come and gone though hasn’t it? I seem to recall Apple switched to something else (USB-C?) and a few here on HN were annoyed because MagSafe was so good - I still have a ~2013 Macbook Air with magsafe that I use in the kitchen. If it’s back then that’s great news for Apple laptops - I haven’t paid attention to them for a while

It is back, yes

Up to 2026? And Apple could license the technology. Patents are also made for that.

Apple has shown that they are not interested in bettering the cable situation and just want you to buy overpriced cables and lock you in. If they were, they would have licensed/opened MagSafe, Thunderbolt, etc.

They could licence the magsafe tech to other brands without allowing them to sell cables/chargers for Apple devices, maybe even alter the size/shape as a requirement.

Do you have a magnetic USB C that supports fast charge ? I haven't had much luck finding one.

No. The dual screen case for my LG phone has one built in though.

The search continues.

Not so sure about that. I have a phone with USB-C and it's the first time I've ever had a jack fail (after about 2 years of nightly charging). Luckily it's a fairphone, so I can replace the bottom assembly cheaply.

That’s quite unusual, but not every contingency can be handled.

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