Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL

Lightning is still better than USB C in terms of physical connector design (Lightning puts the male part on the more easily replaced cable side). Annoying that it’s not a strict improvement being imposed.

At least as far as I can tell, this seems to be a solved problem. USB-C ports on iPhones are holding up just fine.

I'll take a 1% higher chance of a port wearing out over a 100% chance of needing to always carry two cables and not being able to share accessories with Android users any day.

The male part isn't necessarily the key here, the idea is that you put a softer alloy and/or any sprung contacts onto the wear side such that springs and contacts will wear on the replaceable bits. This is the key problem micro USB got wrong, and it's also what Lightning gets wrong (although I'd agree that it was loads better than micro USB).

> Lightning is still better than USB C in terms of physical connector design (Lightning puts the male part on the more easily replaced cable side).

Yeah, basically just repeating what luma said but you have this backwards. USB-C does have the female part on the cable side. Its just also enclosed in a metal cover for protection.

So let me get this straight, the male part which is the most durable one is on the cable side on lightning while on USB-C the durable part is in the phone and the easily ruined female pins side is on the cable?

You can keep tooting the Apple horn, Lightning was better than micro USB but saying it's better than USB-C is incorrect on every measureable point. Lightning is dead, long live USB-C!

The port connector is more reliable on USB-C.

The fine springy wiry bits that are impossible to clean and easy to damage are on the cable, which is a massive improvement. See: the super common broken Ethernet ports.

> while on USB-C the durable part is in the phone

the problem is, it can snap or be sheared off under unfortunate circumstances - say, someone laying their phone on their belly in bed, putting strain on the connector, a chonky cat deciding to jump down right onto the charger cable while the phone is plugged in, or someone dropping their phone while it's attached to a power bank.

With Lightning, it's a matter of removing the broken connector of the cable and that's it. With USB-C, you gotta replace the socket, tough luck on that given that these things generally don't come as single spare parts.

(IMHO, that is the next thing the EU should tackle - parts that often need to be replaced such as sockets and buttons should be mandated to be on a dedicated flex cable that can be easily replaced)

Port replacement on recent MacBooks is quite easy to do since it is a separate part connected to internal port. I wish more laptop manufacturers followed Apple’s steps

For those of us who used to fix PCBs and wire breadboards, it’s nice to see the traces are still there, like knowing where your food comes from, even if any hope of an analog baseband project is long past. Lightning is one of Apple’s hits.

Lightning’s form factor is nice, but there are still a few issues with it. Look at any Lightning cable you’ve used for a few years and you’ll probably notice one of the contacts is darker than the others. That’s from arcing every time you plug it in, and that just cannot be a good thing.

The springs being on the socket is also not a great feature of Lightning, though usually the device itself has a shorter lifetime than the socket.

It’s really not, I’ve had disproportionately more USB-C ports go dodgy because there was repeated tangential force on the cable plug than I had with lightning

Yeah, let's make more things the wrong way for the nostalgic aesthetic.

I'm old enough to have done that, and to really miss the old world, but an improvement is an improvement.

None of the stuff I grew up with is "hackable" anymore. None of the design constraints of small, sleek, performant, high battery life and secure are amenable to that.

Even (production) Linux has stopped being a hacker's paradise and is tightening the rope.

And that's what the iPhone is: a production phone.

You want some cool toys? Get Arduinos, hacker laptops, RPis, Arch.

It's all still out there, but not every device needs to have its guts out.

That being said I will always miss SoftIce, being able to look stuff up in memory, being able to look stuff up in network traffic... alas, it's gone, and the truth is we're better off for it.

Yeah, and so it is on many laptops I've encountered as well. But unfortunately, almost no phones and tablets have that, or it's a ridiculously populated sideboard with matching prices...

The physical lightning port and connector are far superior than any USB-C. It is not even a contest.

The only thing usbc has going for it is wide usage.

Lightning can do usb3 things if designed for it. So software side is not an issue between the two.