Since the original ipod was introduced in 2001, they’ve changed their charging connector one (1) time. In the same period, other devices have used a selection of barrel jacks, USB mini-B, USB micro-B, and USB C connectors.
Third-party lightning cables for power have always been available, and indeed Android phones could have used that connector if they wanted. Apple has a restrictive certification program for SD readers / keyboards etc. that use lightning, but the same applies to USB-C accessories, and this regulation won’t change that.
The indications are that Apple has wanted to switch to USB-C for a while now (as they have, pretty aggressively, everywhere else), and it’s iPhone users who don’t want that to happen. I suspect Apple was hoping to go directly to hole-less phones and avoid a round of people complaining about USB-C’s UX issues (and reduced receptacle lifetime (?))
I’m fairly sure such a thing doesn’t exist, because if the charger has a removable cable, the socket in the charger will be an “A” socket (i.e. the “computer end”).
There actually is such a thing as a USB micro-A socket, but unless you own an HP Prime graphing calculator you won’t have seen one. It looks almost exactly like a squared-off micro-B socket, and yes, that is as vexing as it sounds.
I sort of hope it doesn’t. I’d like charging via cable to still exist.
Wireless charging is, due to simple physics, around 85%-90% efficient at best. For an individual phone losing 10% of the charge is nothing. But in an all-wireless charging future that means 10% of all phone charging is wasted energy. That’s got to mount up to a sizeable amount, surely?
(And note these efficiencies assume a good alignment when charging, which may not happen all the time.)
I’m not a huge eco-warrior, but there’s just something about a 10-15% power loss that doesn’t sit well with me. Especially when it’s purely for luxury purposes. Saving yourself the hassle of plugging in a cable is a candidate for solving the most first-world of all first-world problems.
My only suggestion is a luxury tax on all non-medical or non-hygiene products over a certain volume. (So that small items like heart rate sensors are excluded, and so are items like toothbrushes where wireless charging makes sense from an electrical safety POV.)
I’d set that tax fairly high, but even a low tax like 10% of the sale cost would be fine. The idea is to point out it’s a luxury and allow the consumer to choose… However I can imagine a lot of people will hate the idea!
The thing that really vexes me about USB charging standards is that you now have to weed out the charging-only cables from your collection. (Is this device simply being finicky today, or am I using the wrong cable?)
I’m not sure why you’d think this. They transitioned to completely standard USB-C on all of their laptops and iPads (I’ve used plenty of third-party cables). And they’ve been aggressive about using unoriented connectors since the introduction of Lightning a decade ago. Also, the standard that they would have to comply with specifies the form factor of the connector.
It appears to me all the USB-C discussion is about the charging port on the device. I don’t see any mention about the ports on the charger supplying power.
Expect to see USB-A to USB-C cables around for a LONG time.
On the “plus” side, when something needs more power in the future, they’ll just update the USB-C spec to support that too.
I suppose it does mean people only need 2 cables then, USB-A to C for basic charging and USB-C to C for improved charging. I least I assume that’s the comparison. I almost exclusively use wireless to charge my phone and we upgraded almost all our chargers to USB-C source with the last round of upgrades.
I have a new fast charger that i bought separately to go with my new phone last year and it is a USB-C to USB-C cable and plugs into the charger. I was very confused when i unboxed it
Back when the EU standardized on micro USB, Apple’s connectors had their advantages-- lightning was palindromic, 30 pin was magnetic, and supported more interfaces.
I like USB-C-- it can charge fast, it’s palindromic, it has a faster interface. There’s no obvious advantage to lightning now.
Of course, there are 480 Mb/s cables to deceive the unwary, and few cables actually support 100 W power.
This is all about devices having a USB-C socket for charging. Customers are supposed to provide their own power supply and what is at the other end of the charging cable is entirely up to them. Chances are that there will be a USB-A (or USB-C) plug that goes into a power supply with one or more USB-A (or USB-C) sockets.
Of course, USB-C is “just” the description of a type of physical plug/socket that has very little to do with how devices are charged (apart from offering the necessary electrical connections). Way back when, there used to be a guarantee that a USB-A port would deliver 500 mA at 5 V, which was fine for charging a cell phone overnight but is not great if you want to charge a laptop in two hours. These days there is a separate standard, USB-PD (power delivery), which governs the (complicated) negotiation between a device and its power supply about exactly how the charging is going to go – how many volts, how many amperes, etc. In particular, this means that merely having a charging cable with a USB-C plug at one end isn’t enough – you still need a power supply that delivers the correct amount of oomph for the device you want to charge (a mobile-phone power supply is no good when you want to charge a laptop), and that can actually talk to the device to set things up as required.
Since devices like mobile phones or laptops are no longer supposed to come with matching power supplies (because otherwise the whole idea of standardising the charging plug and avoiding electronic waste in the shape of unneeded power supplies would make no sense), it is now up to customers to ensure that they have the proper power supply to hand, and – given the complicated nature of USB-PD – whether your el-cheapo Chinese no-name USB-C power supply and your expensive mobile, laptop, and digital camera can actually all agree to do fast charges is anybody’s guess.
I’d like to take a moment to point out that the current iPad still uses lightning connectors; the iPad Pro, Air, and Mini have all transitioned to use USB-C.
I suspect that Apple will either drop the iPad model entirely, or when they do refresh it, it’ll have USB-C on it. Frankly, I’m surprised the iPhone 14 didn’t have USB-C on it already.
USB-C isn’t perfect, but it is unambiguously a move in the right direction, (easier to orient, tons of power throughput, in its thunderbolt form it supports four differential data lanes etc).
When traveling I now only bring one charger (the small brick for the laptop) and a couple A->C cables - can charge laptop, phone and camera simultaneously, the latter two can be daisy chained - and due to the power delivery capability, the camera battery charges while installed (no more battery charger dock thingy).
The thing about technology standards constantly changing is that yeah, they do - until they don’t. Look at 20th century tech - it took a couple decades before RJ-11 jacks became standard for telephony - and they’ve stuck around for 50+ years. Even AC plugs went through some iterations before settling down - (really old vacuum cleaners had cords terminating in light-bulb style plugs before bladed wall sockets existed).
And, as infamously shown with the Raspberry Pi 4, screwing up that negotiation can cause some problems. (The issue was that if you plugged an E-marked USBC cable into the PI 4 in order to power it, the device would either power off right away, or just not power on at all. You had to use a ‘dumb’ USB C cable to get around it.)
To be fair to the Pi team, the USB-C spec is something like 329 odd pages, and that does not include the USC-PD spec.
doen’t the “ipad” use older tech? The ipad pro has an m1, so does the air, the ipad mini has an a15; and the latest incarnation of the ipad has an a13.
Similarly, my ipad has a A10 fusion, and the nearly contemporaneous air and min used a12 chips.
Yup. As I noted, it’ll probably switch over to USB-C when Apple refreshes that model.
I think part of it is because a lot of POS companies use an iPad as a basis for their hardware, and switching connectors means retooling a bunch of other things.
