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Comment by asalahli | Hacker News Reader

Thanks to an EU regulation mandating type-c connectors

To be honest, Lightning was always dead in the cradle because of it's licensing fee. Apple tried to take the high road for so long, but vendors actively avoided Lightning unless they could buy bootleg, unlicensed connectors. Apple basically took a serial standard hostage, and then insisted that it was okay because they did it before USB-C was finalized. There's no way Apple didn't know from the offset that they were diverging from the standard and creating e-waste, they helped design USB-C. The creation of Lightning was an exploitation of 30-pin's depreciation.

The plethora of crappy, bootleg cables with USB-C connectors that are single purpose (power only, low-speed data only, etc) has created plenty of e-waste, in addition to confusion. I don’t see how this is an improvement over the licensing model, where you know every cable works the same.

The number of “USB-C” things I have that aren’t is infuriating. Won’t use a real charger or PD, only works with an A to C cable, only works when plugged in “right side up”, etc.

At least with Lightning and Micro-B you knew the score.

The good USB-C stuff is great. The rest is worse than B ever was.

What are they exactly? I haven't see such issue in years.

They’re not “real” computer devices but other things with charge ports. One is an air duster, for example.

I also have some credit card payment hardware that is clearly USB-B and they just swapped the port.

The computer world seems fine. It’s everyone else.

The licensed model failed. I own multiple gas-station Lighting cables with no data, only (5w) power. Ultimately everyone converges on the "fuck it, what's the cheapest thing on Amazon" mindset and licensing doesn't help.

But that's what all lightning cables are. Low power limit, low speed data only.

I can put 12w through a lighting cable. That’s fine for most if not all of their iPhones and iPads. Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

> Hell it’d be ok for my MacBook

If you keep it turned off for entire day to charge then sure.

You can put 12W through all USB-C cables as well (AFAIK). The crappy ones might be limited to something between 12-50W, while decent ones allow for 100W or more.

According to DannyBee, it was Google, not Apple, that helped design the USB-C connector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30033799

Reply on news.ycombinator.com