I’m pro USB C all the way, but I definitely appreciated the lightning connector. It’s smaller, fewer things to go wrong with it, less delicate… so to speak… at least the female side seems to be from my experience. The male side isn’t half bad either, but the cables apple used for their USB to lightning wires was basically trash. Every time I witnessed someone with a bad iPhone charging cable, the connector was generally fine and the wire was torn to shreds.
The biggest weakness of the standard was that it was stuck on USB 2.0. Beyond that it was pretty good.
I still like USB C more, both for speed and for how ubiquitous it is; but, being fair to lightning here, the center area were the pins are is a failure point, one wrong move and it’s toast. Granted it’s nestled in there pretty good and the chances of that actually happening is pretty small, but lightning doesn’t have this issue.
Lightning is far from perfect, but they did a good job… for the time. Right now the only benefit to lightning is twofold, it’s everywhere, and the connectors basically never broke with normal use. At the time micro-B was horribly fragile. C is way better than micro-B was, but I still think that lightning has the crown for durability IMO.
With all that being said, USB C all the things. Lightning was a shining example of a better way, and hopefully we learned from that. I don’t know what comes after USB C, but I hope the improvements are significant. It will be a while before C goes anywhere though.
Possibly, but Apple’s shitty version of the cable basically made it break more on the actual cable than the connector. It seems that this may be fixed with usb c because of the thicker cable though.
It WAS a good cable about 6 years ago when even flagship phones still used micro USB. I would have killed for lightning on my old android phone. However, usb c just takes the cake, every cake. It has its own problems but the tradeoffs are miniscule compared to lightning.
No 🤣
welcome to 2014 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C
This was a crucial step in Apple’s journey into becoming a trillion dollar company. Dongles.
Lightning is/was actually pretty great. Also remember that it was introduced before USB-C even existed.
Yeah alternative was MicroUSB which is dogshit.
I think the problem is that between lightning cables and USB-C, one is made by an asshole company who wants you to use it for your phone and literally nothing else, and one is useful for your phone and literally everything else.
USB-C wasn’t really useful for anything when Lightning was introduced, on account of it not even existing as a spec, let alone actual hardware, until 2 years later.
i am happy the standard has won but tbh, i prefer the lightning type of connector (male). if only Apple standardized this instead of USB-C which is far more fragile.
but as I am not going to buy an iphone anytime soon , this is a non-news to me. :)
Lightning was a good cable. It’s just that Apple didn’t improve it any for a decade and never opened it up so it could have been a standard.
It’s smaller and more durable. It’s just slow and proprietary.