Lighting’s connector itself is great - cables should absolutely be male and USB messed up in that regard. The locking mechanism is also far superior, and overall I’ve had 4 USB C ports fail, 2 due to the locking mechanism and 2 due to the inner male part of the port breaking - these are issues far less with lightning.
That said, the restrictive data speeds and restriction on who can use it, both of which are down to apple, do have a hit on it.
If it was possible to do something along the lines of USB 3.2 (which it should be as USB A manages it with 5 pins vs lightning’s 8/16) over a lightning connector that’d be way better than USB C but you can’t really force apple to give everyone else a proprietary component
Type C can’t be similar to lightning wrt the advantages you’re describing because apple prevents it through patents. So you can thank apple for a worse type c design than necessary.
I’m not sure. I haven’t looked into this, but it might be that the USB controller sits on the SoC. Non-Pro iPhone 15 uses the same SoC as the 14 Pro. To get USB 3 speeds you need to re-engineer the SoC, which adds a huge amount of cost. I expect the iPhone 16 to have USB 3 across the board.
Lighting’s connector itself is great - cables should absolutely be male and USB messed up in that regard. The locking mechanism is also far superior, and overall I’ve had 4 USB C ports fail, 2 due to the locking mechanism and 2 due to the inner male part of the port breaking - these are issues far less with lightning.
That said, the restrictive data speeds and restriction on who can use it, both of which are down to apple, do have a hit on it.
If it was possible to do something along the lines of USB 3.2 (which it should be as USB A manages it with 5 pins vs lightning’s 8/16) over a lightning connector that’d be way better than USB C but you can’t really force apple to give everyone else a proprietary component
Type C can’t be similar to lightning wrt the advantages you’re describing because apple prevents it through patents. So you can thank apple for a worse type c design than necessary.
the iPhone 15 still only supports USB 2.0 speeds over the USB-C port. only the Pro models get bumped up to USB3.
Exactly, that just evidences that it’s Apple under Tim Cook that’s bad, not Lightning as a port
I’m not sure. I haven’t looked into this, but it might be that the USB controller sits on the SoC. Non-Pro iPhone 15 uses the same SoC as the 14 Pro. To get USB 3 speeds you need to re-engineer the SoC, which adds a huge amount of cost. I expect the iPhone 16 to have USB 3 across the board.