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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR:

> The iPhone 15 Pro sports Apple's new A17 Pro APU, complete with a new on-die USB controller block. However, the vanilla iPhone 15 makes do with the last-gen A16 Bionic chip, which lacks that new USB controller and only has the original Lightning controller onboard.

In that context it makes more sense: the cable isn't limited to USB 2.0 speeds, it's limited to lightning cable speeds (which are the same), they literally only changed the connector.

It's still annoying but it's understandable that they made the tradeoff, I imagine making a whole new "A16+USB-C controller" chipset would be expensive with little upside for most customers.

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IMO it's more a meh because for me (and probably 97% of phone users) it's more a piece of historical trivia that the phone's charging cable can also be used for data transfer. It would not surprise me if most iPhones go their lifetime without having data transfered over a hard wire.

So why bother to put the new hotness in if it's not going to matter to almost all users?

97% of phone users don't care about a lot of features. Let's remove them all one by one. Accessibility first!

Exactly what do you need the speed for was my first thought. The only thing I came up with is maybe car play, but if lighting/usb2 speeds are sufficient then it’s mostly moot that the flagship has usb3. Maybe the extra usb to lightning controller will draw some extra power.

It would be expensive to make a whole new SoC, but a PCIe USB controller costs very little compared to the price of the phone.

They could have used a 5 Gb/s USB controller for market segmentation, it would still be 10 times faster.

> a PCIe USB controller costs very little compared to the price of the phone

But integrating that controller into the phone? I assume there's a reason it's currently heavily integrated into the SoC and that not doing so would have drawbacks.

You probably meant "USB 3 controller" rather than "USB-C controller", The USB-C is just the connector + tons of its own protocol headaches and a "USB-C 2.0" connector is totally allowed.

Realistically, nobody who buys a non-Pro iPhone is going to care about the speed of the cable. It definitely seems like a good tradeoff to me.

What makes you think so?

It's anecdote, not data, but I don't know a single person who has used their USB cable plugged into their iPhone to transfer data in a very, very long time.

So it intuitively aligns with my personal life and career experience.

Filthy Android user here.

I don't use NSA scanner tools or upload my sex tapes to Google's AI training model, so I sync my photos to my local NAS once a month.

Not sure why you (or anyone else) needs to wait a full month to sync. Seems like a potential failure, since you could lose as much as a months worth of photos.

OwnCloud or any of the other automatic, fully local syncing apps do this just fine daily. Then you sync photos/videos every time you're on your local network.

I tried owncloud once, and it was janky in my opinion. The once a month sync is an accepted risk. I also sync immediately before and after traveling.

This has been my experience as well. iPads are a different story (useful for wired Sidecar, serving as a graphic tablet for a Mac, loading up large video files to watch, etc), and those have all gotten USB-C along with their chassis updates.

If you're just taking a normal amount of photos and videos then cloud syncing over wifi works well. The fast data transfer rates are going to be most useful to people recording 4K video, especially if using it for professional projects with more than short clips.

Maybe the most important feature allowed by the USB 3 speeds is that iPhone 15 Pro can record directly to an external drive, so you can plug that in to your editing machine and not worry about the phone's internal storage at all. But it's not something normal people are going to do.

What use cases do you know of that would make >450Mbps speeds noticeable? (And I mean actually noticeable, not "this movie will take few seconds less to copy") Backups are incremental. Data copies are usually used for a small subset of files. Any common hardware attachments need way less.

I've never used my iPhone cable for anything other than charging and debugging, and even the latter I mostly do over WiFi. I can't think of a single case of any of my family members plugging theirs into computers – to them the cable is a "charger". Using a phone in combination with a laptop/desktop is an incredibly niche use-case.

What makes you think any non-pro users do need data transfer capability?

I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but I very rarely copy data over lightning. I think I’ve only ever done it a couple of times over the past few years, to copy mp3s to my phone from my laptop (which I gather is rare in this age of streaming).

Everything else goes over Wi-Fi.

Would it be nice if the cable was faster? Yes. Would I pay more for it? Dubious.

Plugging your phone into anything is a security risk that deserves assessment.

Not an iDevice use, but it is very rare that I've transferred anything over a cable to/from my phones in recent years and I'm pretty sure I can say the same is true for many of my friends & other contacts.

I could imagine some people do though, for transferring video or big pictures when on slow asychronous Internet at home and don't want to wait for everything to sync up to the cloud. I shovel stuff over local wireless via SFTP in such situations but that is not a man-on-the-street compatible solution.

Agreed, I don't think I've ever copied anything to/from my (Pro) iPhone with a cable. Obviously this might be different if you're a videographer creating huge files, but in that case you'd probably go for the Pro

Agreed. I have not read 1 article or comment in the last 5 years about people complaining about their slow iphone sync speeds. It has been a complete non-issue, but now that there is a USB end, people now find it unacceptable? Please.

I would buy an iPhone with no openings, no ports, no speakers, no mic. (4s size pls)

I never thought I wouldn’t sync my phone to a computer, but here I am. If I have to, opening the case to make a debug zif connection isn’t a big deal.

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