• @sugar_in_your_tea
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    119 days ago

    the one place where it’s not USB C is the phone

    My understanding is that they committed to 10 years of support for the lightning connector, which was released before USB-C became a thing. I can’t find a source for that, but it lines up pretty well with the timing of things (introduced in 2012, replaced around 2023), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a deal like that.

    • KillingTimeItself
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      19 days ago

      that’s a possibility, but i feel like that’s a really shitty excuse especially for newly manufactured phones, apple only just recently stopped shipping charging blocks with their phones, i believe they still ship cables though.

      It’s like committing to funding 300 billion dollars of coal power plants, only to have natural gas become a big deal in 5 years and then pivoting to natural gas, i feel like it’s just, normal.

      • @sugar_in_your_tea
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        118 days ago

        There’s more to it than just the cables, there’s all of the companies that integrate with their phones. There are a ton of accessories for iPhone, and they probably have contractual obligations to maintain compatibility for some amount of time.

        • KillingTimeItself
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          118 days ago

          and they all pay for the licensed lightning cable, they would love for nothing more than using USB C instead, apple doesn’t even have to stop producing lightning cables. They just have to stop using them on phones.

          This is like the equivalent of not being able to manufacture a car because you slightly changed the design of how the transmission mounts to fix the problem where the transmission fucking grenades itself all because “well maintenance is hard”