Apple Should Have Struck Out Lightning Sooner

Last month, Apple announced their latest iPhone models, the iPhone 15 line—the first iPhones to use the USB-C connector instead of their proprietary Lightning connector.

I'd seen rumours that Apple would be switching to USB-C for their new phones, so I was cautiously optimistic, but not entirely sure they'd follow through. So when I tuned in to the Apple Event livestream at 4am to hear they were actually doing it, I said to myself, "Finally!"

The switch to USB-C is something that a lot of people have been wanting on iPhone for quite some time—USB-C allows for really fast data transfer speeds, and having the same connector on every device means we don't need to keep a bunch of cables around. But now that the phones have been out for nearly two weeks, and I've actually read up on them at all...I'm frustrated with Apple again.

If you look at the Compare page on Apple's website, you'll notice the following:

Huh?? Even though all the phones now have USB-C, only the Pro models actually have higher data speeds? What the heck, Apple?!

At first, I thought this was just Apple being greedy—deciding that being able to get photos off your phone quicker is something only "pro" users want or should have, and therefore something they can charge more money for. But when I was discussing the phones with a friend last night, they brought up an interesting point: the chip in the standard iPhone 15 models is based on the A16 Bionic used in last year's Pro models, and since none of last year's iPhones supported USB-C, the chip isn't optimised for it.

On one hand, that makes sense. Lightning is a decade-old standard, built around USB 2—it was never built to accommodate the higher transfer speeds of USB 3. So if you're building a phone with Lightning, why build it to accommodate for speeds it'll never reach? But on the other hand...Lightning is a decade-old standard. USB 2 is even older—it first came to market in 2000. Just about every Android phone released in the past four years has USB-C, and I'm sure a lot of those support high transfer speeds.

So Apple's stubbornly stuck to their own, proprietary, inferior connector for years, refusing to change until forced to do so by a government mandate, and for what benefit? So they can continue to charge accessory makers to use their standard? So they don't have to pay a nickel in royalties to Mr Jeff USB for every phone they sell? Keeping Lightning on the phone doesn't benefit the user, and it sure as heck doesn't benefit the phone itself.

In the past, Apple has made the excuse that replacing the Lightning connector would create "an unprecedented amount of electronic waste"—an excuse that doesn't entirely track with me. Sure, a lot of people are going to upgrade to the new phone, and a lot of those people are probably going to just throw their old phones and cables away, rather than recycling or donating them—but not everyone is going to be able to. The rest of us old-iPhone-havers are kind of just stuck with the Lightning port, so we're not going to benefit by throwing out our old Lightning cables and buying new USB-C ones. Also, Apple already produces a lot of electronic waste:

• If the batteries in your AirPods die, you'll have to buy a new pair—you can't just take them to a repair shop to have the batteries replaced, because they're soldered in, very small, and designed to be extremely difficult (if not impossible) to remove.
• Apple is very much an opponent of Right to Repair, and likes designing their products in general to punish users for getting them repaired by anyone but Apple. Install a new battery? Now you can't see battery health anymore! Get the screen replaced? Goodbye, ambient light sensor!
• Back in 2017, it was reported that Apple forced the recyclers it partnered with to just straight-up shred the iPhones and Macs they collected.
• Admittedly, this last criticism feels less significant in comparison, but a lot of Apple cables I've used in the past felt stupidly fragile—they seemed to break just a couple of months after buying them. (Though maybe I was being rougher with them than I should be? I don't know.)

So it's a bit hypocritcal, I think, for them to claim such a decision is likely to cause environmental harm. But even taking that excuse into consideration, the fact that Apple's held on to Lightning for so long means there are a LOT of Lightning-based iPhones, and if they'd continued holding onto it this year, that would just be even more iPhones. If they'd just switched to USB-C back in, say, 2019, there wouldn't be quite as many iPhones now that relied on the connector—so them being stubborn has really only worsened the situation.

What makes their stubbornness even weirder is that Apple is the company that kind of forced USB-C on everyone in the first place. Their 2015 MacBook was released with just a single USB-C port for everything, even charging! (I mean, it did also have a headphone jack, so it at least has that over modern smartphones.) This was only a year after the USB-C standard was finalised, so there weren't that many products yet which supported it—so if you bought the new MacBook, you'd either have to buy new accessories for it, or buy Apple's adaptors to be able to use your old ones.

Granted, it's not 2015 anymore—USB-C is a lot more widely supported, as it's proven itself to be a very capable, flexible standard. But given that Apple was so eager to push USB-C with the MacBook back then, I would've thought they'd want to bring it to the rest of their products in a more timely manner. I guess maintaining control over that part of their phones and making a tiny bit of extra money licensing out the connector was more important than, you know...actually improving it.

Anyway, sorry for for the messy rambling. I just wanted to get my thoughts on the situation out there. If you read this far, then thank you for taking the time to do so. If you didn't, or you just skipped ahead to the bottom of this post for some reason, that's fine too. I appreciate you being here nonetheless.