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Comment by withinboredom | Hacker News Reader

Money.

Apple can easily afford this. The real reasons for their foot-dragging are their need to differentiate their products, and their need (driven by their organisational culture) to feel that they are in control.

What he means is, having a proprietary connector means they can milk accessory makers with licensing fees.

What accessory makers? The only thing lightning is used for these days is charging. I can’t imagine that charging cables is a huge money spinner for apple.

Here's a few accessories I can think of:

- headphones

- displays

- "gas station" chargers (for when you leave yours at home and just need something cheap)

- memory card readers

These are just the ones I own.

Other than charging cables, none of those are the average person uses on an iphone. The ipads now all use usb c.

I cant imagine Apple would be risking huge fines for the EU for the 10 people who plug SD cards in to their phone.

I assume the large car makers are paying apple a huge amount to be able to install lightning cable adapters in the cars.

They’re not. In fact I’ve never seen a lightning port on a non-Apple device. The other end of the cable is either USB-A or USB-C.

And Apple is pushing for new vehicles to use CarPlay wirelessly anyway.

It is not the charging cables, but the actual chargers itself. They are eye watering expensive if you buy them from Apple directly.

Amazon and eBay are flooded with fakes that can be life threateningly dangerous. I can see why some people prefer to buy from Apple rather than figuring out what brands are actually not going to burn your house down.

I just had a look. The charging bricks they use are USB-C (the phones come with a lightning to C cable now) and cost $30 AUD. That seems very cheap.

Versus $0 for all the chargers I have collected over the years.

Use those then? They all work on the iPhone

Goodbye goalposts.

Good point re dangerous fakes, but I wonder how persuasive it is in practice. Ive occasionally seen teardowns of fire-risk power blocks on hn, but (genuine question, because idk) is that a mainstream concern?

I bought a 100W Apple MacBook charger from Amazon. After using it for a few hours, it has a burnt smell. I can't be the only one that experienced this.

If its an oem charger them I'm not surprised at all. Imo its just not worth the risk.

I get that.

But I've always struggled to believe that revenue from licencing or direct sales of Lightning connectors is that big a deal to Apple. I think their insistence on using their own connector is more about product differentiation and lock-in than about revenue and performance.

Why do the new ipads have USB-C then?

Because they want you to be able to use external USB docking stations. Lightning doesn't interoperate with external displays.

I don't think this is the main reason. How many millions in licensing fee profit are they really earning? It seems like a drop in the bucket comparative to their total profit. And if that's the reason, why does the iPad have USB-C?

Lazy reasoning. Previous bad press when changing 30-pin to lightning.

The bad press was because it was a proprietary-connector-against-a-newer-proprietary-connector.

Had Apple changed for USB-C at the time, or USB mini, it would have made the same positive press as when the Macbook Pro got back to normal (ie not “Here’s a single port for everything, go buy an Apple dongle if you want to plug a screen”).

No, it really wasn’t. It was people and places that had invested in 30 pin sudden;ly having those be useless.

USB was _awful_ at that point.

The USB-C spec wasn't finalised until the following year and only fully standardised in 2016. The USC-C port, which Apple contributed to considerably first appeared in 2015. Micro USB, which superseded Mini USB, was and remains to be complete and utter shite. Lightning was actually well received by the tech press of the time for being significantly better than Micro USB. The "bad press" was users on this site, among others, whining about their other 30-pin gadgets.

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