This is only true for the non-Pro models. The flagship models get USB 3.0 speeds, which seems like a fair trade-off, and it seems like it's tied to the USB controller inside the SoC, since the non-Pro models get the same SoC as the iPhone 14 Pros (last gen), it is pretty clear what happened. Nothing really to see here or complain about.
They’re also not engineered to the standards of an iPhone either. The cost comes from somewhere… everyone has been fine paying for usb 2.0 speeds over lightning on even the pro max versions as recently as today because they’re still selling iphones.
I get it, android phones have a better cost/benefit for you. Some people prefer the tradeoffs that Apple makes, like privacy, quality materials, a different OS, battery life, etc.
> everyone has been fine paying for usb 2.0 speeds over lightning on even the pro max versions as recently as today because they’re still selling iphones
Yes because they had no choice! Apple literally gave them no choice to select to use a 10 year old technology. Something that has been standard in Samsung Galaxy phones since 2017.
Unless they were willing to give up an entire ecosystem they had invested thousands of dollars in have purchased apps, have their data stored everything.
It's Stockholm syndrome.
It's almost as bad as the comment above saying "yah it's reasonable to need to pay for the Pro version for USB 3.0"!
And we all know if Apple had launched with USB 3.0 6 years before the competition and called it lightning 2.0, users old never stop talking about how necessary it is, and how Apple so incredibly caters to the needs of their users and how big a difference is it.
I don't know how they do it, but that company gets people to blindly believe whatever they're told. And rationalize away any terrible decision.
There is only one other consumer company that I've seen get away with that.
I agree with what you're saying, yes Apple is a terrible value; but Apple customer's don't seem to care about that and I'm not sure if it's really cause for outrage. I also doubt that most customers will even notice the difference. It is quite rare that I connect a cable to a phone for data transfer, and when I do, if I have a 2.0 cable nearby I wouldn't bother reaching any further for a 3.0 cable, even if the phone supports the faster speeds. Even if I'm loading up some movies for a flight or something, practically speaking it's such a rare event that I would just initiate the transfer and grab a snack or something. It's pretty obvious why they did this, I'm not sure it's such a bad engineering decision really, to make the best of the silicon they already have. And for users who actually do care, the ones who are lurking on HN, they are compelled to spend more for the speed.
You managed to entirely miss their point in response to complaining about iPhone pricing.
Namely that there are other factors that justify the cost of iPhones v. the cost of low to midrange Androids.
The proper counter to that would be for you to give examples of a low to midrange Android, at that low to midrange Android price, that is able to match the specs and build quality of an iPhone, besides USB speeds.
Alternatively you could also concede that they have a point of course.
They don't care about USB 2.0 because they're so brainwashed with crippled devices that they think that iCloud is necessary to get data from their phone to their PC.
Yeah it must be the kool aid and not the fact that the average iPhone user barely ever transfers anything from their iPhone to a PC much less ever uses their cable for data transfer.
I know more seniors that know their way around AirDrop (or things “magically” appearing on their desktop device via iCloud, unbeknownst to them) than people that even realize that the cable they use to charge their iPhone could also transfer data.
Next you’re gonna tell me that they don’t care about Cat5 because they’re brainwashed to think WiFi is necessary to get internet.
> And you're also brainwashed to think that the only way to get stuff from your phone to your PC wirelessly is via iCloud.
Keep your strawmen to yourself, I never stated iCloud is the only way to transfer data.
> I use SyncThing and it works fantastically, with no fees and no spying.
Good for you. I don’t recall asking.
Grow up and accept that other people have preferences that differ from yours and maybe in the process you’ll also learn that using FOSS doesn’t make you as edgy and cool as you think.
As an aside, I can only surmise you don’t even know what iCloud entails because not only does SyncThing not officially support iOS (you know, the topic at hand), but even using the only available *paid* option, Möbius, doesn’t even come close to the iCloud experience.
>not only does SyncThing not officially support iOS (you know, the topic at hand), but even using the only available paid option, Möbius, doesn’t even come close to the iCloud experience.
You do realize that this comment only further shows how brainwashed Apple victims are, which was precisely what my initial comment was about?
That they have internalized and accept that their artificially crippled devices won't allow you to transfer data privately to your own PC without using their cloud, which comes with the associated costs and privacy implications? They are artificially crippling devices to monetize your data.
Apple is ruining computing, and Apple victims are too shortsighted to be concerned about it.
I was talking about getting data from your phone to your PC without sending it to Apple.
I don't understand why people accept that it's necessary to send that data to Apple and back in order to perform such a basic function.
It doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not, that's still an artificial limitation that Apple has put on the devices you supposedly "own", all so they can monetize your data.
But Apple will tell you these limitations are for your own good, or security or something.
And people seem to love the taste of that refreshing kool-aid.
it's crazy to me just how much fanboy wars have fallen into "products that I don't want to buy should be outlawed". especially in this android-vs-iphone arena.
> If this was any other company they would be lambasted.
I’m sorry, are we still talking about Apple here?
The very same Apple that gets lambasted no matter what they do because it makes for great clickbait and fuel for fandroids?
They very same Apple that got lambasted for being the first to fully embrace USB-C on their 12” MacBook back in 2015 and now is being lambasted for being the last to adopt USB-C on their phone lineup.
I shudder to think what other companies go through if your definition’s threshold for being “lambasted” is so high.
> Presumably the same product team that decided we didn't need a headphone jack, as we could just buy more overpriced and profitable dongles and cables.
They were right. I haven't missed the headphone jack once. Bluetooth earphones are cheap and easy to come by, if you want premium sound you can buy an expensive set. The headphone jack was outdated and not needed. If you REALLY want a wired set, a dongle is <£10 from apple or <£5 from amazon. This is a stupid complaint.
People with crazy ass multi-hundred (or thousand) dollar headphones complaining about a fucking $8 dongle will never cease to amuse me.
I actually wonder if they wanted to get rid of the headphone jack not because of the space it took up (which is significant for the number of connections) but for help with 'water-proofing'.
I also feel like one of the main reasons for at least the design of the lightning connector was multi-faceted. At the time their obvious other choice would have been micro usb B, which is a terrible connector that fails often, especially in cases where it is heavily used. It would have been a support nightmare for them. The design of lightning being a thicker 'core' type connector rather than the flimsy core of a micro usb B or even usb C probably made it easier to make water resistant and cut down on hardware support concerning the connector. I know that on the few occasions when I was having problems with cable connections to an ipad or iphone i'd grab a pair of tweezers and find some lint in the female side of the connetor.
A dongle that I have to carry everywhere, that is trivial to lose, and that blocks charging my device unless I buy an even more expensive and awkwardly shaped/sized dongle - a real winner.
I like Samsung hardware but I can't go without the headphone jack.
I like large phones, so I'll probably end up with an Asus ROG phone, but they're slightly chunkier than I'd like, and I'm not really a fan of the "gaming" aesthetic.
By you. People with existing setups and sometimes expensive headphones would disagree. And the whole donglemania is ridiculous - especially models with only Thunderbolt ports are practically unusable without a hub.
It's difficult to detect sarcasm these day so please excuse me if I misunderstood your comment. But Apple is notorious for extorting disproportionate money for features that cost much less in competing products, such as memory and disk storage, and also for straight anti-customer behavior such as making most key parts irreplaceable by users so they have to stick with whatever specs they got. The only thing "I trust Apple with" is that they do their best to maximize profits.
Suppose I've already sunk my money into a "special" thing and find out it lacks some bog standard goodness. Perhaps it was even designed to lack this goodness. I might reflexively ask, "Does anyone actually need that goodness?" in a desperate attempt to save face and prevent myself from feeling like a goober.
Above, my face-saving sentence was written to seem so reflexive and thoughtless that the query ends up sounding absurd. I mean, technically, it is at least coherent to ask whether the time saved by not having to deal with a particular class of problems is ever necessary, in any sense from remaining employed to the survival of the human species. In any case, it's also a red herring.
Above, someone called this face-saving tactic a "cope" which I've never heard but now love. :)
Totally agree. For all the complaints about "omg they're using a 23 year old spec", the article appears to say that this is the same speed limit as the lightning controller (the one sold in their 14Pro model) that no one seemed to have an issue with data transfer speeds.
And the other commenter that pointed out "who exactly uses USB for data transfer anyway?" is spot on. I'm not even an iPhone user and about the only time I do data transfer by USB is when I'm moving stuff to a new phone.
Point being, 99.9% of people who buy an iPhone are never going to notice the speed differential. I feel like all the people complaining are either people in that .1%, or people who just like to complain.
People just like to complain. If you were to ask someone on the street with an iphone when is the last time they manually transfered files to their iphone using a USB cable the overwhelming majority would have no idea what you are talking about.
> I actually think this is a little bit Apple being spiteful for being forced to move to USB-C and honestly I'm a little bit on their side on this one.
Honestly it’s probably not even that. It’s probably a SoC limitation that the base models reuse. On the Pro line they bumped it up to 3.0.
I don’t want to be super angry. That sounds awful. Am I really supposed to be?
Can someone make a case that a large group of mainstream iPhone users are plugging in their phones and need better charging speeds? More than 480mbps? And if that were true, where was the upheaval during the Lightning port area? I look around and I just don’t see this group of people, but maybe I’m missing something.
This is what Apple is like as a company though. It's always been baffling that so many people that work in IT and should know better champion them so much.
Being different is really important to some people I guess.
The Pixel 7a costs $444 for similar specs. If iOS, the Apple ecosystem, and other creature comforts aren't worth $355 to you, why complain and just buy the Pixel? Seems like less fuss and muss.
Am I the only one who feels that 128GB is a huge amount of storage for a phone? Or is it because I still remember when even desktop computers had storage sizes best measured in megabytes?
Take any pictures or video using the built in cameras and you’ll feel how tiny that storage is really fast. Not all of us are still working at 640x480.
Then how do you transfer those large 4k videos? From reading the comments here I feel weird because I always use USB3 to transfer my videos from my (Android) phone to my PC.
What do iPhone users do to get all that data off their phones and onto their macbooks?
Yeah, I keep reading people saying who transfers files by USB these days, nobody needs that speed! Meanwhile, I'm quietly doing that here right now in the corner thinking I'm a weirdo because all these HN people say so. Thanks for the reality check, bubble popped
It automatically appears on my Mac devices (and iPads for that matter) via iCloud.
Hell, nowadays it does the same for photos and videos taken by my SO if they took the photo/video while I was with them.
Now that I think about it, I’ve got “Optimize Storage” enabled on my devices, so if storage is running low it should keep a lower resolution instead of the original stored locally. But I suppose they must use a FIFO logic, because my most recent stuff is always available locally in full resolution.
If I need the older stuff for a project I click export on it and it’ll download the full resolution, which doesn’t take more than a few seconds because I’ve got 1Gbit fiber connection.
I guess the closest thing that comes to a manual transfer would be AirDrop where it would transfer it via a 5Ghz ad-hoc WiFi connection (or via LAN if the extra hop via the router would be faster with an ethernet connected Mac in the olden days).
In practice it reaches about 1Gbps, but I rarely to use it because by the time I need it it’s already synced.
I only use it a few times a year when I’ve shot B-roll with the iPhone at my desk and immediately jump into editing.
I haven’t used a cable to transfer data to/from my iPhone in probably more than a decade with the sole exception being when I push out builds from Xcode to the iPhone.
Yeah, this hits hard if one is shooting videos in 4K (and why would one not use the highest resolution that’s supported?).
Photos, unless chosen to be shot in RAW and the highest resolution at all times, are comparatively not as big a deal on space used with the HEIC format (choose High Efficiency as the format in the camera settings).
Since most people tend to keep all or most of the photos they ever shot over the years on their phones, it just adds up.
I'm not even a phone power user, and I have over 300GB used on my phone. I only have a couple games. A lot of the data is probably offline storage of cloud backups and downloaded music and movies. But I use a phone with an actual SD card slot, so I freely download things offline because of that.
I think apple made it basically a non-issue with how they implement iCloud and it's hard to justify buying higher capacity phones. I'm one of those weirdos who like to keep all the pictures I take on my phone locally and not in the cloud so my personal phone is 512GB and I kinda regret not buying the 1TB option, but that must be super rare among the user base.
So we pay almost $1000 for phone and then we should pay subscription for cloud storage and be happy because UX is ok and we didn't have to pay for extremely overpriced piece of NAND storage to avoid subscription.
Modern customers stray further from God every day.
It also provides you backup which if you value your photos you'd have anyway.....so presumably if you didn't pay it to apple you would pay it to someone else, but with worse UX and integration.
Like, there is a value in what Apple is offering. It means someone like my mum never ever has to think about storage or backing up anything, when she lost her phone she got a new one out of a box, signed in and all of her stuff was there without having to do anything. As a power user, could you achieve the same for less? Sure, but for average user the value is there.
It’s cheaper to pay for the 2TB iCloud for 2 years than it would be to upgrade to larger storage on the phone. It’s actually even less because my whole family uses the same quota together.
That's because on-device storage is overpriced in order to make your math work :-)
Then it's easy decision to throw in a few more dollars for streaming service and you are nice recurring revenue instead one-time sell.
Also it's probably cheaper only if you consider only Apple ecosystem. Other mid-range device comparable to base iPhone with bigger storage is probably cheaper.
I guess we’re both of bunch of weirdos because I’m reading through some of these comments and am wondering if there’s some sort of Luddite convention that I’m unaware of.
The idea that all of my media would be stuck on one device and at risk or that I would have to go through the laborious process of manually syncing it all regularly by hooking up my devices is a nightmare.
Everything automatically syncs to all my devices, including photos and videos me and my SO take in each other’s presence, all recent media is immediately available at the highest native resolutions and I never have to worry about anything.
I’ve got terabytes full of stuff going back years and for good measure I’ve got an automated backup running to a NAS.
Out of an old fashioned mindset I’ve got a moderately upgraded iPhone with 256GB, but 200GB of it is apps because I tend to download apps from fellow developers.
A fraction of that is spend on photos and videos because of automatic storage optimization and a fraction is used for music and podcasts that’s also automatically managed for when I’m traveling.
I’ve got professional cameras and by far the most annoying part is transferring media despite having access to the highest theoretical transfer speeds available on the market today.
Or buyers, across all of time, experience utility differently person to person, and hence end up with different utility per dollar calculations and hence different purchasing decisions.
Yeah, but if you can order identical guacamole with one pinch of salt for $5 and guacamole with two pinches of salt for $20 without feeling a little screwed you probably need some guac rechab :-)
Apple's brand is generally pro-consumer and pro-experience. How is such dated technology (i.e., USB 2.0) anywhere close to Apple's brand (read: market expectations)? If any other company said, "Here's a brand new 2023 $800 device with USB 2.0..." there would be blood in the social media streets.
There were plenty of other ways to differentiate the pro and non-pro models. Using USB 2.0 is lazy and shortsighted. Obviously, not on-brand either.
> If any other company said, "Here's a brand new 2023 $800 device with USB 2.0..." there would be blood in the social media streets.
I would bet against this, because I would bet 99% of people will never use a wire to transfer data from the phone.
The 1% who care will spend an extra $200 on a Pro model.
This is price segmentation / microeconomics 101, you can earn more money by asking for more money from people who want to pay more, and asking less money from people who want to pay less.
Moi? I usually access my images via iPhoto or Google Photos in a browser and then download from there. Rarely have I connected a device to my laptop or MBP. Occasionally, I've used BT to transfer, but again that's rarely.
In theory, the USB C port should allow us to connect a docking station / monitor to a iPhone 15 but I'm not so sure Apple has that in mind. afaik, you need at least USB 3.0 to do that.
Most people don't do this these days; they use iCloud or Google Photos (or whatever that's called these days) or Dropbox or something. Assuming they want their photos on their computer at all, or indeed have a computer; for many the phone would be the primary doing-stuff-with-photos device.
I've had an iPhone since 2008 or so, and yeah, back in the day there were lots of cases where you'd want to plug it in. I'm not sure I've _ever_ plugged my current (4 year old) phone into a computer except purely to charge, though.
Good point and it's where apple lacks - instant, potentially p2p sync or browse using mac. Wifi speeds are good enough. AirDrop is absolute PITA to use other than sharing few pics with friends once in a while. Waiting for icloud to complete uploads at ~10mbps is shit experience.
Think of this from the point of personas and their uses. What are the personas for 95% of the market and what tasks will they do that relate to USB transfer speeds? I suspect Apple has done this analysis and that most iPhone users won't notice the difference for the non-pro models.
Remember, the hacker news crowd as a group does not represent the masses of iPhone users.
Apple wants their users to use iCloud storage. Transferring photos and video by cable is not the suggested way of usage for most iPhone users. Using iCloud sync, your photos and videos are already waiting for you on your Mac. At least, if everything works and you aren't a heavy "Pro" user. Of course, that is not only a "pro-consumer" tactic, but a "pro-service-revenue" one. And if you are a "Pro" user with lots of data to transfer, you can either but the USB 3.0 cable or subscribe to the new 6 TB and 12 TB iCloud storage options. Or just do both. Of course, you need a Pro model ... but aren't you a Pro user in that case?
To be fair to Apple, iPhone users (even those buying Pro models) have endured USB 2 data transfer rates for years. Why should they care now? Apple's customers are well-versed in apologetics.
Because now that port isn't Apple-only any more. It's a market wide standard and now other device manufactures can trigger the market to care.
"Let's go with the fax machine-y technology..." and the rest of the meeting attendees signed off? Perhaps the brand manager was on holiday? :)
p.s Put another way, I was waiting for the 15 and the USB-C. I'm not going to spend $800 on a device w/ USB 2.0, and I'm not going to spend $1000 just to get what is also a relatively dated technology (i.e., USB 3.0). Which is kinda funny...we're debating the value of USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 isn't exactly the current standard either.
Yeah, I get it. I'm an edge case. Most people don't care. I simply find it hard to believe that Apple so willing cut corners - for no reason - on the flagship devices.
> I'm not going to spend $800 on a device w/ USB 2.0
Is this purely kind of on general principles, or do you have a specific use-case for USB 3.0? Because if you do, well, yeah, fair enough, you're an edge-case, but it's worth remembering that most users do not; most people never plug their phone into a computer these days, except perhaps to charge it.
> Why should they care now? Apple's customers are well-versed in apologetics
Instead of assuming the millions of customers are deluding themselves into a worse experience, consider that they don't care for this particular feature, and the median user does not need it or think about it at all.
For most people, the cable is a means to keep their battery full. That's it.
The only people I hear complaining about the usb transfer speed are photographers/videographers who shoot using an iphone. That audience choses pro models because they have better camera already.
I personally have not used a cable to transfer anything since icloud backups came online.
It should be noted that usb-c on the non-pro models is no slower than lightning on any previous model.
They had announced that USB-C would be limited to USB2 speeds over a year ago. I don't know when I've ever felt the need to move data to or from my phone any faster over a wire. Unless backups are for some reason backups are wired, non-incremental and you have a 256+ gig drive filled up, in which case it could take just over an hour.
They have a stockpile of old chips. Better to use them up then scrap them. Especially if no one will notice the difference outside of people who read the tech specs.
Interesting. From what I can see, the 14 Pro starts at $999, but the non-Pro 15 will start at $799. Are there any features the 14 Pro retains that the non-Pro 15 drops?
I’d assume the display hardware is also different, seems dumb to waste panels able of 120Hz variable refresh rate. The always on display is probably from the ability to run it at very low refresh rates, so that’d also be linked.
And the macro photo could be using the telephoto lens, I’ve no idea (photography does not even remotely interest me).
if you think proraw/prores vs h.264 encoded videos is an artificial differentiation, then you clearly don't do video editing. that's fine, but don't write differences off just because you don't know/use them.
I assume by artificial they mean software, as in the iphone 15 and 14 Pro use the same SoC so they should have the same coding capabilities. Although it's possible prores is handled by a separate controller chip on the Pros (AFAIK only the M-series have hardware prores).
that is a much different take that what i had on the use of artificial, and does put a different look to it entirely. an artificial limitation imposed by Apple vs and artificial difference from user's non-use of a feature.
Correct, I'm referring to artificial limitations on products used to differentiate between tiered price points. I don't like to use the other definition of artificial when describing features themselves for the reason you point out... even the smallest features might be very useful to certain people.
This is a skip a generation iPhone for me, USB-C is cool and all but by the time I'm ready to upgrade they should have something much better out there.
I skipped a few generations and if things going like this (no new feature that I’m interested in), at this rate I will change it when Apple drops the support.
Apple _definitely_ seems to have decided this is a 'pro' feature, annoyingly. I'd have bought the M2 MBA in a heartbeat if it had it, but as it is, I'm waiting for the M3, anyway.
(Of course I may just give in and get a personal 14" MBP, in which case they win...)
No, it's not clear what happened from just the transfer speeds.
It becomes clear when you see that first party cables that enable hight transfer speeds are sold at 79, 149, and 179 bucks for the 1m, 1.8m, and 3m respectively [1]. So, in essence, they purposely did just enough to comply with EU regulations while still aiming at milking customers' wallets with crazy expensive accessories that you would take for granted from top or premium tier smartphones.
those are thunderbolt cables, not usb-c cables. they're backwards compatible but they have extra signal pairs to support PCIe tunneling, and much more stringent shielding and termination that allows 40gbps bidirectional transfer (and the next thunderbolt standard goes to 120gbps).
Also, Apple's 3m cable is actually not unreasonable when you consider that that's actually beyond what the thunderbolt spec theoretically allows, even with an active cable with a repeater chip the limit is supposed to be 2 meters.
but lol @ people objecting to apple rolling out usb-c now, that's gotta be a conspiracy too for some people. every damn apple thread.
if you want to buy a normal cable, just buy a normal cable.
I would not discount market segmentation purposes, even though it seems like a bit of a mess: on the ipad front
- the 4th gen ipad air supports 5Gb USB, the 10th gen iPad only supports 0.5Gb, both use an A14
- the 5th gen ipad pro supports 40Gb USB, the 5th gen ipad air only supports 10Gb, both use an M1
But I've been told these ports are not symmetrical, the highest speeds are only in host mode and come from a separate USB3 controller, and the soc integrated device mode has much lower specs (10G for the Pro, 0.5Gb on the A15-using 6th gen mini — 5Gb capable in host mode).
There is no separate USB3 host controller on the M1, it has a dual-role device USB 3.1 controller which supports up to 10 Gb/s and can act both in host and device modes.
The 40 Gb/s speed on the iPad Pro comes from the Thunderbolt controller, which is completely unrelated to USB and disabled in software on the 5th gen iPad Air for market segmentation.
The 4th gen iPad Air and 6th gen iPad Mini use a USB 2.0 dual-role device controller integrated into the SoC, which is limited to 480 Mb/s, and a USB 3.0 controller connected over PCIe, which supports up to 5 Gb/s.
The PCIe USB controller isn't included on the 10th gen iPad.
It doesn't support device mode, which explains the USB 2.0 speeds when connected to a computer.
Because it's a feature vanishingly few users actually use. They have all the numbers, it's a very small niche of people that actually transfer things by cable. Most of that niche is photographers and videographers that shoot using their phone. For those people a Pro or Pro Max is non-negotiable already because it has the better camera. So they get the fancy camera and the fancy transfer speed. They even address this IN THE ANNOUNCEMENT VIDEO.
I assure you, I am not a corporate sycophant. However, the article linked here is a classic definition of FUD. The histrionics in the comments here seem to mostly be driven by anti-Apple zealotry rather than any reasonable analysis of the facts.
There is exactly nothing forcing anyone to purchase an iPhone 15, and it very clear in all of the materials from Apple what the different between the Pro and non-Pro models is. The iPhone 14 Pro was discontinued (at a higher price) to make way for the non-Pro iPhone 15, since they are roughly equivalent in capabilities... including in their USB speeds.
USB speed was a non-issue 30 days ago, and now it's an emergency that is worthy of histrionics, hand-wringing, and FUD, including calling anyone pointing out how ridiculous this is a "corporate sycophant".
Your comment is the kind of anti-apple zealotry mentioned. Lightning was superior to what was out there at the time (in some ways it still is). But, Apple went full in on usb-c awhile back, and has been walking their largest selling lightning product towards usb-c for awhile. It's like everyone just forgot the complaints Apple received when they changed from the 30-pin connector. I've already heard from non-tech friends, "why is Apple is making me buy new cables?!" By including usb-c to lightning with the last couple iPhones and moving other lower volume products to usb-c, Apple has tried to make the switch easier on customers. But yeah, the EU forced them.
The design of the lightning plug is vastly superior to their other choices at the time, namely the 30pin dock connector they had been using and the only other obvious choice micro usb B, micro usb b is the most cursed connector in recent memory. It's fragile as fuck, I don't know how many of those fucking plugs I've replaced for friends in devices of all kinds.
The lightning plug design on the other hand is as close to bulletproof as you can get for the size and number of connections. The only time someone has ever come to me with a problem with a lightning connector it's been quickly resolved by taking out some very fine tweezers and pulling a bit of lint or dirt out of the female connector.
That the last gen pro didn’t have USB-C at this point is ridiculous. That’s part of my point.
The other part is that when they went through the design work to put USB-C in (per the legal mandate), they didn’t spend the extra 2c to put a USB3.x or whatever host controller in. Because it would likely have cost them less than 2c to do it.
They didn’t just swap a plug and call it good in a rush, they made multiple new models, that they are selling as improvements and they segmented it so that the $800 model has speeds from prior ancient tech.
That’s being a dick. On top of the ‘being a dick’ of continuing to use their proprietary connector 5+ generations after it stopped being relevant.
So, the alternative would have been that they'd have to produce a new SoC. This would add cost (both the upfront development cost, and costs relating to the inevitable waste of the old chip). This cost would be absorbed via either lower margins (good luck with that, it's Apple we're talking about) or higher cost device. Approximately ten users would ever notice the difference.
I think Apple made the obviously sensible decision here.
Doesn't sound like force to me. Teenagers are assholes, news at 11. Note, that post was flagged for being pointless flamewar content, and I also flagged this submission we're in now for being pointless flamewar content and FUD.
I flag anything that doesn't meet HN guidelines. It's as simple as that. HN does not need more flamewar content, especially flamewar content that doesn't add any new information to the conversation.
There's a ~1000 comment thread about the new iPhone models already on the HN front page, yet this article was posted specifically to spark a flamewar and the article itself is FUD clickbait that adds nothing new to the conversation that's not explicitly stated in the press release. During every iPhone release for the last few years, they have used the previous-generation SoC for the non-Pro models, and that is the core reason the non-Pro iPhone 15 has USB 2 speeds, because that's the controller in the SoC.
This is neither surprising, nor worth litigating. It's something Apple themselves socialized over a year ago.
> During every iPhone release for the last few years, they have used the previous-generation SoC for the non-Pro models
iPhone 14 (last year) was AFAIK the first time they did this (non-pro iPhone 14 didn’t get a new SoC and kept the one used in ALL iPhone 13 models) and there was quite an uproar.
Nothing forces Apple to use their own years-old USB controllers on brand new phones, which they're manufacturing right now. Nothing besides artificial market segmentation, I mean.
The controller is built into the SoC. As is their standard practice for many years, non-Pro models receive the SoC from the previous generation of Pro models. Because this is the case, in fact they don’t have a choice other than spending billions of dollars to retool an older SoC.
The fact you and others seem not to understand this should be an indication you aren’t informed enough to have a valid opinion on the topic.
They'd have to produce a new SoC, which would be a lot of cost (and I believe generally a small power usage increase) for a feature that, to a first approximation, no-one would use. It is really, really uncommon to transfer large amounts of data over USB on an iPhone these days.
The point was that there is a point of view issue here. A person familiar with the issues of sourcing Apple's SoCs and less worried about their own costs in purchasing the device might view this as a "fair trade-off." A person unfamiliar with those issues, or merely a person highly concerned with value for money, might view it as a lame product feature segmentation. And I suppose there's the point of view of tech journalists to be contended with as well.
you make a pithy simple comment with "to whom?" because it's something you feel the opposite about. it's quite clear the very person you replied is one of the "whom" you're inquiring. to even challenge that is just gaslighting the situation after the fact.
I agree with the parent, practically every passing HN reader will understand that one of the 'whom' is the user your replying to. So it seems like a lame response.
It would be different if they wrote it in a way that suggested no personal belief.
everyone knows that it is cheaper for a company to mass produce the same hardware at scale then lock/unlock features via software based on the model the vendor wants to make. in order to make different lower price models, some features are disabled. why this is hard to accept is beyond me. well, actually it's not. it's clear that some people just have issues with retail and companies making things they don't agree with and just come to the internet to argue, and here i am falling for it.
> everyone knows that it is cheaper for a company to mass produce the same hardware at scale then lock/unlock features via software based on the model the vendor wants to make. in order to make different lower price models, some features are disabled.
If the OP is correct, this is exactly not what Apple has done. They've equipped the lesser models with last year's SoC. The question of whether this is the kind of feature that ought to be gimped, ever, in 2023 remains.
> it's clear that some people just have issues with retail and companies making things they don't agree with and just come to the internet to argue, and here i am falling for it.
Perhaps you would have had a happier time if you hadn't attributed intentions to me which I did not possess, a couple of times. But if you enjoy doing that, well... enjoy!
Out the door... Minimum $900 bucks where I live. That feels close enough to a grand that trying to explain away usb 2 speeds with "But it's a budget phone!" is pretty disingenuous.
Not 100% free, but a pretty low cost. If you were planning on switching carriers anyway for lower "new customer" rates and don't have a use for your old phone it is free.
Honestly, who cares? Does anyone even transfers data via USB from their phone anymore? It’s been 4-5 years since I’ve done that. It’s all in synced via iCloud now.
There's no shortage of people shooting 4K video on iPhone these days. Being able to get it onto a laptop to edit in a reasonable amount of time matters to them.
You can AirDrop data pretty fast to a Mac, but I don’t think I’ve ever done that, Apple Photos sync reasonably fast over a 5G connection. Downloading video from my phone to a computer is not anymore a thing that I do, it just happens.
Weird take. Who cares about data transfer speeds? Lots of people. Many parts of the world dont have the same cell service coverage or wifi stability you may have.
It sounds pretty simple as a case of if it's important for you, then you should seek out other options, like the pro. Android phones also come in a mix of 2.0/3.0 speeds.
Because there's a human scale to things at the end of the day. It's why we will probably never need 16k resolution for phones - the human eye can only see so many pixels.
iPhone 15 max storage configuration is 512 GB. So you can transfer the entirety of the phone in 10 minutes. Plug it in, have a coffee and come back. Is it changing anyone's life if it can be done in 90 seconds instead? How often do you need to transfer the entirety of your phone storage?
edit: math was indeed wrong, it takes about 2 hours. But like okay, is that too long?
But at the same time, I don't really yield my point. 2 hours - just plug it in at night and it's done in the morning. We routinely do things where we plug in a phone for 2 hours
That's a meaningless number. When was the last time you saw anyone even attempting to transfer hundreds of gigabytes of data using their phones? Do data hoarders now see their phones as some ideal NAS or what?
Genuine question: How does USB 2.0 compare to Bluetooth (Airdrop) and wifi (assume local network or ad hoc, not icloud or internet) speeds on the 15 line?
EDIT: TIL more about the underlying mechanics of Airdrop than I thought I would, appreciate the lesson.
Actual Bluetooth is slow, 1.5Mbit or so, depending on the implementation. You wouldn't transfer large amounts of data that way. Maybe a photo, or smallish files. But, as the other poster noted, Airdrop uses Wi-Fi direct now so it's at wifi speeds.
Modern Wi-Fi 6 (what is in the new iPhones, even in the older iPhones) is theoretically much faster. Gigabit+ speeds. In practice, you can expect similar or faster speeds vs. USB2 over Wi-Fi. If it's ad-hoc from iPhone to iPhone, it should be much closer to theoretical max since they will be in close proximity.
I’ve seen both AirDrop and LAN over WiFi reach a steady state at around 55-60 MB/s in ideal conditions, which is remarkably similar to USB 2.0. That speed is only reached when the devices are stationary and close to each other though, any movement causes a temporary drop since wave compression or interference presumably results in signal degradation and some sort of checksumming to occur.
Also I can’t recall the specifics but AirDrop only uses Bluetooth to negotiate the connection. The underlying transmission uses peer-to-peer WiFi, so it’s no surprise their speeds are similar to each other.
Incidentally, I’m sure there’s a myriad of practical reasons why it would have been too early for Apple to go entirely portless, but funnily enough as it turns out, a decrease in transfer speed compared to USB 2.0 over Lightning wouldn’t have been one of them.
waaay back in ancient history, we breathed a sigh of relief at the State Department of Transportation when we received the messaging that we didn't need to cater to every edge case when designing an internet facing customer (who, at the time, might have had a 9600 baud modem)
Many parts of the world got Cell coverage before they got land lines because they were cheaper to deploy.
“The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.
That WiFi stability is a problem is a weird take. WiFi is extremely close range. If it's a problem: 1. Get a cheap WiFi router. 2. Find a place with low wireless interference. 3. Transfer over LAN. Problem solved. Moreover, 99.99% of people can just skip over to step 3.
But you don't need internet access to replace USB cables. WiFi should deliver gigabit transfer speeds between your PC and phone, however unstable the upstream connection may be.
Have you run across 802.11ax anywhere outside of your house, or perhaps a high end office building? When you have, was there bandwidth enough to actually use it?
That’s all I’m saying. If you take a lot of photos/video and you’re trying to get it off the phone, it sucks if you’re travelling. You can’t even plug it into your laptop and get it off decently (though it’s still often faster than hotel Wifi).
I literally was hitting 500kB/s (hotel wifi) upload speeds this week, and it was an improvement - I had to pay extra. I ended up using lighting to USB2.0 cable to pull what I needed off.
I’ll just end up getting the Pro model anyway, but like intel disabling ECC on all but their ‘server’ CPUs - it’s unnecessary, irritating, and restrictive. Well within their rights though.
In their own launch presentation, Apple was taunting how the USB-C port now enables "professional" film makers to shot 4K60FPS directly to external storage
the problem is it's not just one feature, it's USB3 and ProRes and the PHYs for handling external displays, and a bunch of other stuff besides. in aggregate the cost adds up, it's a larger and more expensive SOC and a higher-end phone with more expensive hardware.
If a large portion of the market will never use those features, why not exclude them and make the phone $200 cheaper? and thus, we arrive at the reason why "base" and "pro" model product tiering exists (not just for apple either).
would it be nice if you got the 7800X3D for 7600 prices? sure, free stuff would always be nice.
is there an argument that if you're spending $1000 you shouldn't be compromising on features? yes, that's why I buy NVIDIA products and not just "we have a bit more VRAM" or "we're 5% faster in raster perf/$".
I'm sorry, but USB3 and ProRes have nothing to to do with each other, and comparing a USB3 controller with a 7600 to 7800X3D upsell - which is about yields/binning and chiplet bonding - is ridiculous.
The real and only reason for not having USB3 in the iPhone 15 and 15 plus is because them using last-gen SoCs in non-Pro phones in recent times. Not because of cost, or power, or performance - it just only had a USB2.0 port so they put in a USB2.0 controller.
On the Pro, you can plug in a USB flash drive and back up pictures and video in the field.
It also appears there will be 4k display support on the pro which would give you an instant Apple TV while traveling and could even be a decent laptop replacement.
I do because I despise the idea of iCloud, but I’m also completely happy to pay more for USB 3.0. It’s like the new MacBook Pros — ample ports (again), which for my uses are worth paying for.
I'm one of those weirdos who still uses local-only, wired backups.
And you know what? I still don't care about the transfer speed at all. Every couple of weeks I hook my phone up to my laptop and let it do its thing while I'm working. At some point it is finished. End of story.
Not everyone uses iCloud. I still refuse to have my most personal data backed up to a corp server. I’m probably in the minority but I’m sure there’s a sizable number of people like me.
Even without that philosophical angle, local backup is the only way for backup and restore a phone or tablet 1:1 (except Secure Enclave) as some bits are not backed up on iCloud.
(this can be seen once restored: via icloud authentication is stripped off, with local everything not relying on secure enclave or specifically tied to a device stays authenticated)
The most secret data is data that‘s not there. Why would I choose to trust a black box cloud with any of my data not knowing what’s going to happen to it (now or in the future) when I can just use my PC for that.
And local backups are faster, do store more data and don’t cost a monthly subscription.
I know they have backed out of scanning photos on your phone but that used to be a thing they did if you did use iCloud. Plus I have several dozens of terabytes of photos and videos of my family so the storage iCloud offers (until yesterday) wouldn’t have been enough anyways. I just use backblaze and their unlimited storage feature along with historical roll back which gives me all the storage I need.
On the flip side I can’t use Apple Pay or Find My which is a bummer.
Check out PhotoSync if you want to do local transfers wirelessly. Super nice to have. I wouldn't expect the every day user to set it up but for super users its really nice to have.
I just airdrop all my photos/videos/notes to local storage and upload encrypted bundles to backblaze so I guess to answer the GPs question the port doesn’t make much difference to me. I do make local backups but skip the photos/videos because I dislike the large single photo library bundle file it generates that has become corrupted more than once so it hasn’t taken all that long.
No one cares. Most people don't use the USB cable to transfer to their iPhone anyways, because it automatically backs up to iCloud every day wirelessly, and there really isn't any reason to transfer data to an iPhone via cable.
The few random people who do are probably videographers looking to transfer their large video files and buying the pro models anyways.
Even android users probably aren't paying attention to what speed their USB was.
I'm shocked that is even a selling point. I've been using an iPhone and iPad for about 8 years and never transferred data this way. I've only used usb for midi or keyboard inputs where data speed was not a factor.
I'm really curious about the reason why they did it though? Is it a significantly cheaper chipset or something? Apple, in general, has favored high throughput I/O in their devices (scsi, firewire, lightning port). The only rationale I can think of is that they felt they needed one more point of differentiation to boost the pro models.
USB3 / USB 4 was enabled with an external chip in select iPads. This has a power, space, and material cost. It may not even fit in the phone space or power budget at all.
For the A17, they added USB3 to the SoC. I bet the iPhone 16 non pro will have USB3, when it gets the a17 chip.
One thing that a lot of people are missing is that the iPhone 15 Pro is using the "A17 Pro" SoC. It'll be interesting to see if the base iPhone 16 will also have the Pro SoC or if they'll be using a non-Pro version.
Will the non-Pro version also be 3nm? Will it support USB3?
Following the same pattern they’ve used for a while, the older phone will get the same A17 chip. The special high performance X/Z stuff was always for the iPad line only.
I am not aware of any special “pro” only a series chip.
We’ll see. Per an other user, the iPad Air is capable of full usb4 / TB but is software locked to 10Gb for segmentation, so that’s hardly unimaginable. Especially if they consider modern transfer speeds to be related to direct ProRes streaming.
Maybe, I’d like to see some sources that the chip is actually the same as what they use in the pro iPads.
It also could be heat related in the iPad Air, it has a thinner and lighter chassis with less metal. Thunderbolt uses a fair bit of power at 40Gb/s! Let alone say, providing 15w of power to whatever device like an external SSD.
Scroll to the "chip" section, and straight from the horse's mouth they both use a 4+4 / 8 M1, I rather doubt Apple has a variant of that chip which removes ip blocks (AFAIK the only variant is the 4+4 / 7 chip still available on the super low end MBA).
> You mean like the dozens of teardowns of M1 macs when it was released, which only found retimers on the motherboard but no external controller?
Thanks for the info!
> I see you are wilfully obtuse and entirely unserious. I'm sorry I bothered.
No, you are being an asshole and a bit of idiot. I said it might be heat related - so there is a reason beyond market segmentation that apple does not include thunderbolt in the iPad air. I don't know why I am bothering either, but here we are.
But when you need it for that random 1-off thing, you’ll be cursing out Apple for how slow it is. Like this one time I had to transfer over air-drop to a Mac and it took hours because their Mac was too old to transfer via wire from my iPhone. Like wtaf.
Edit to add. Their Mac didn’t have usb-c ports and that’s the only charger I had with me and no adapter. They were an Android user.
Is it though? Really? 480 Mb/s is quite fast for most applications, especially those involving a smartphone.
Any user with files large enough that this transfer is ostensibly slow is a videographer of some sort and has likely bought the pro model or at least planned for this event.
What sort of file is a "random 1-off thing" that a casual user might need to transfer, unexpectedly, over the wire, which is so large that a speed of 0.48 gigabits/sec is extremely slow?
The non-pro model can transfer a 5GB file over the wire in around a minute. Again, what is the real-world use case or scenario where a non-pro, casual user would find some random 1-off file, that is so large that the 0.48 Gbps speed is lacking?
Every so often I transfer all of Wikipedia to my phone (using one of the Kiwix extracts, which are ~100gb). It takes forever (~1 hour). Until VERY recently (last few months) the Finder did not even have a progress bar for iPhone file transfers.
Personally I am very excited for this transfer to happen over USB3 in the future.
I live on an RV and end up working off of solar power far from cell service, so when I run out of power for Starlink there's no internet and Kiwix is super handy for relevant reading material.
> What sort of file is a "random 1-off thing" that a casual user might need to transfer, unexpectedly, over the wire, which is so large that a speed of 0.48 gigabits/sec is extremely slow?
In my single anecdata case, out of 15ish years of owning phones, it was a 4kx60fps video of a recital and about 30gb if I recall correctly.
Also, you are doing a classic mix-up of mega-bits vs. mega-bytes. A 30 gb file transferring at 480 megabits per second takes around 5 minutes with no protocol overhead (about 20% speed reduction) and assuming the flash on the phone can keep up and isn't doing anything else on the wire (probably another 20-40% reduction in transfer speed).
How did I mix up megabits and megabytes? I mentioned a 5 gb file transferring at the same speeds takes a minute or so. That tracks with your 30 gb:5 minute calculation.
> Megabits per second (Mbps) are units of measurement for network bandwidth and throughput. They are used to show how fast a network or internet connection is. Each Mbps represents the capacity to transfer 1 million bits each second, or roughly one small photo per second. It may also be expressed as Mbit/s or Mb/s.
Ah yeah, that's fair. I just reread my reply and realized it came across as much shorter than I intended, sorry for that. I wasn't trying to be an antfucker.
I care. I have a legitimate use for USB 3 on my phone.
My home ISP is unreliable. It doesn't care if I'm in a time sensitive meeting. When it does go away, I need to quickly get back into my meeting.
Sometimes it goes away for hours. It has also gone away for days sometimes. I need an alternate internet connection, and preferably one that doesn't require my neighbourhood to have electricity, because that also is unreliable where I live.
So I use my phone. For short durations of use, I use the Wi-Fi Hotspot feature, but for longer durations I switch to USB Tethering.
At USB 2 speeds, I'd guess, the Ethernet connection can only negotiate a 100 Mbps link speed. That is much slower than my home ISP.
The phone I use currently has USB 3 and cost me half the price of an iPhone 15.
Up until a few years ago I still manually backed up my iPhone (x4) photos to my PC. The process was terrible, would fail frequently and was slow but I took my lumps because I wanted full control over my photos and wasn't ready to pay the Apple tax.
I pay the Apple tax now, and curse Apple each time they tell me my iCloud storage is almost full. I have TERABYTES of available local storage but Apple keeps my photos hostage in their shitty iCloud world.
I would gleefully go back to managing my own photos if Apple wasn't actively trying to prevent it. /rant
You don't have to sync your photos to iCloud. No one is forcing you to. Just go to your Photos setting and disable iCloud Photos. Use your terabytes of local storage to your heart's content!
Spot on! I read the article and for some reason thought that Apple has made a big mistake. You’ve reminded me that I literally never plug my iPhone in. I charge with MagSafe and transfer everything over the network.
I use MagSafe in my car and next to my bed, but I do appreciate the faster charging of a cable when my battery is low.
I do feel that the differences and selling points of these devices vs the previous devices have gotten so trivial though.
USB C is nice, but the suggestion in their presentation that I carry around a usb charger for my Apple Watch and would charge my Apple Watch from their device “directly” or that a millimeter this way or that way in width or thickness matters at all. These things are just the most trivial differences. I can’t believe I spent over an hour watching their stupid presentation.
