People keep mentioning Wi-Fi Aware with this, but so far haven't seen anyone actually prove that this is the case.
Apple undoubtedly added Wi-Fi Aware support to iOS https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware, but its not clear whether iOS actually supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware. Apple clearly hasn't completely dropped AWDL for AirDrop, because you can still AirDrop from iOS 26 to earlier devices.
Note that the Ars Technica article never directly makes the claim that Apple supports Airdrop over Wi-Fi Aware. The title is two independent statements - "The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop" - that's true.
> Google doesn’t mention it in either Quick Share post, but if you’re wondering why it’s suddenly possible for Quick Share to work with AirDrop, it can almost certainly be credited to European Union regulations imposed under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Again, they're just theorising. They never directly make the claim. Would love on Hacker News for someone to do some Hacking and actually figure it out for real!
In 2020 Google's Project Zero found a zero-click remote RCE in Apple's AWDL implementation. So at least some folks at Google are fully equipped to build a reverse engineered implementation. Discussion on that awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270184
Just `tcpdump -i awdl0` while Airdrop-ing to a Mac to observe it's still using AWDL. (unless the interface named awdl0 is actually using WiFi Aware...)
Another fun thing to do: `ping6 ff02::1%awdl0`. Pings all nearby Apple devices with AWDL active. Including things like your neighbor's phone that's not even on your local network. (but addresses rotate I believe so can't track persistently)
It’s funny how we’re all trying to piece together the stack from bits and obscure clues. Would be so cool if Apple and Google finally embrace their role as “essential public infrastructure” and release their specs, interoperate, etc.. so one doesn’t end up trapped one way or another when picking a personal device.
Once something becomes so widely used that almost everyone has one, the public interest is involved. In the same way that cars are essential public infrastructure and have to comply with public safety standards, interoperable fuel nozzles, etc.
It's frustrating how much people want this to be an EU win they'll fabricate evidence. The same happened with RCS in iOS, everybody jumped in to credit it to the EU, when you can find the document spelling out how RCS is a requirement for China.
Don't forget that Apple is feeling sore and playing the petulant child in their PR regarding EU regulations, especially regarding the digital markets act. They don't want to appear to give in the EU, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Apple doesn't want to admit that the EU forced them.
There is very little literature about Chinese requirements rolled out
and when there is, its talked about as American tech companies bowing to an authoritarian regime as opposed to fighting a burgeoning market force acting on behalf of consumers and the American tech companies losing that fight
the latter is how the EU work is syndicated
in between is that there likely is no fight with Chinese regulators alongside an unwillingness to alter access to that market
I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their victory.
I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.
We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.
They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.
They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.
The sad thing is that you and the person you are arguing with are both right: Apple and Google are lock-in monopolists, and the legacy telcos were much worse monopolists (remember paying for ringtones?), and the car manufacturers want to foist terrible software on people with their own brand of lock-in.
Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market.
> They shouldn't be strong arming [...] the entire automotive industry.
Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay.
With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
> With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition.
Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google.
Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive.
All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
Before CarPlay and Android Auto we had TomTom for $130 and map updates costing about $40. The map updates from car manufacturers were always sold at a premium.
I bet Google Maps pays for itself through ads alone. In addition Google Maps gains a lot of invaluable data from its users like new businesses, reviews, pictures, updated opening times, traffic data and more. So no Google Maps isn't really "free" it's paid for by its users with ads and free labor to improve the mapping data.
Having the users split between different navigation software is a worse user experience because the mapping data will be worse. So I welcome a monopoly in this case.
The hard work of mapping is done by the government in most countries and paid for by the tax payers. So you are just paying the car company to convert the mapping data you already paid for into their proprietary format.
When standalone GPS units for $500 were popular the big car manufacturers were still trying to sell GPS as a $2000 option.
We've seen time and time again car companies will charge whatever they can get away with. So i'm very skeptical that maps actually cost $150 for the companies that charged me $800 to enable bluetooth calling.
When companies compete, consumers win. Don't make the error of thinking that because they're doing it for selfish reasons, it doesn't benefit you.
> If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150.
That might be true, but it probably isn't. A larger company can spread the cost out over a larger number of customers, meaning the cost per customer is lower.
Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too.
Big tech is literally a machine putting a ceiling on your ability to build.
They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules.
If you get big enough, they self-fund an internal team to compete with you. Or they offer to buy you for less than you're worth. If you don't accept, they buy your competitor.
Capitalism should be brutal. Giant lions that can't compete should starve and give way to nimble new competition.
You shouldn't be able to use your 100+ business units to subsidize the takeover of an entirely unrelated market.
They are an invasive species and are growing into everything they can without antitrust hedge trimming. Instead of lean, starving lions, they're lion fish infesting the Gulf of Mexico. They're feasting upon the entire ecosystem and putting pressure on healthy competition.
Your own capital rewards are cut short because of their scale.
Do you like not being able to write apps and distribute them to customers? It's okay to pay their fee, jump through their hoops, be locked to release trains, pay 30%, forced to lose your customer relationship, forced to use their payment and user rails, forced to update on their whim to meet their new standards - on their cadence and not yours?
Do you like having competitors able to pay money to put themselves in front of customers searching for your brand name? On the web and in the app stores? So you have to pay to even enjoy the name recognition you earned? On top of the 30% gross sales tax you already pay? And those draconian rules?
That's fucking bullshit.
We need more competition, not less.
Winning should not be reaching scale and squatting forever. You should be forced to run on the treadmill constantly until someone nibbles away at your market. That's healthy.
Competition from smaller players should be brutal and unending.
That is how we build robust, anti-fragile markets that maximally benefit consumers. That is how we ensure capital rewards accrue to the active innovators.
Apple and Google are lion fish. It's time for the DOJ, FTC, and every sovereign nation to cull them back so that the ecosystem can thrive once more.
> They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules.
You seem to be arguing that the EU should be doing that though. What about those of us who quite like the way Apple does things right now? I'm happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points, I quite like someone to be acting as a firewall between my device and the unfettered soup that is stuff out on the internet.
Apple's product is a well curated walled garden. I certainly understand why there are a lot of people on HN who don't like that - they see 30% that they can't claim. But one of the reasons Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience.
>> Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience.
I disagree, may be they were at some time. Now they are successful because the walls of the well are so high. It is insanely difficult for us frogs to jump. Happy that governments are trying to bring those walls down
>> I am happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points.
Good for you because you trust them. Problem is I am not. I dont trust apple/google to make that decision for me. But they dont give that choice. They are making you sacrificing freedom, choice by masking them self as secure. But underlying motive is profits and control.
I heard a story that apple asked meta for comission on ads , when meta rejected they introduced features to remove access to usage metrics to 3rd party apps. If meta agreed , you might never see the privacy features app introduced.
The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.
> The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.
And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores. That seems to be cheating. When Apple convinced me their App store model was better than the alternative they had to use, y'know, persuasion.
Nokia sorta died, but at the time back in the 2000s Apple had to get through the entire phone industry to establish the iPhone. If the Europeans had any idea how to manage this sort of ecosystem they'd still be running the show. They had an amazing market position to begin with. They flubbed it because no-one in the entire continent seems to know how to run an app store! Now they're legislating their bad ideas in. It is a very European approach to commercial innovation and success.
yes I agree, but we need to change with the age. in early 2000's it is hard to distribute apps/software, and 30% commission made sense.
now it is not, there are several people/companies who can make the app distribution better, efficient for all consumers. they can bring it down to a fraction (apple itself has by now bought it to a fraction of what it costs in 2000).only reason they are not passed down to consumer is because they made sure there is no competition (by force(google paying samsung to not develop its app store) or by design (Apple limiting 3rd party installs and discouraging webapps) - basically how a monopoly/duopoly behaves). it is bad for us consumers
if apple has developed all the tools libraries itself from scratch , put hardwork and sweat into it, i wont have a issue. we all know thats not the case and how much opensource tools helped.
> Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too.
Nothing in GP's comment gave any indication that they were a "hyper capitalist". You're just being emotionally manipulative, disingenuous, and acting in bad faith. This is categorically inappropriate for HN.
Apple was clearly moving towards usbc (which they helped develop). Their laptops and iPad pros had moved along with the pro phones. To think the EU the reason usbc came to the iPhone is ignoring the clear path Apple was on. At best they put it in the rest of the phone line a generation early.
Any fight that Apple put up was performative and them not wanting any sort of precedence to be set.
Oh, look what "over-regulation" does, forcing companies to comply to standards so they can't vendor lock-in their users (this happened with the iphone charging port too, from the apple specific port to usb-c).
Guess this type of consumer-benefic changes wouldn't happen in the land of "freedom".
It's likely that without laws such as the DMCA, there would already be easier, legally legitimate ways to circumvent Apples technology preventing interoperability. So as usual the new regulations try to cancel out the problems caused by the previous regulation, while having their own side effects that require future regulation to cancel out, ad infinitum.
A positive effect from regulation does not rebut the general argument against government regulation of industry.
The problem with regulation isn’t that there are never any positive effects, of course there are.
The problem is it’s impossible to reliably avoid adding substantial friction to life via overly broad regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, or outdated but still-in-effect regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, at least.
If this only bothered huge companies then I would say cost of doing business, who cares, etc, but it actually affects things like how cities and towns are designed, how expensive housing is, how expensive medical treatment is, etc.
It's unclear exactly what you're arguing, but I think if you are arguing that, because of the unavoidable substantial friction caused by regulation, we shouldn't have any regulation of industry at all... I think it's trivial to find examples where banning all regulation of industry would make the world a much, much worse place. Much worse than the friction.
Even though overly broad regulation is a risk, I don't believe little/no regulation is an option either. I don't think the US's consumer protection mechanisms work, and I'm happy to accept the downsides of the EU's systems that come with the upsides of regulation.
I mean, housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated and so the capital exploits the poor who can't do otherwise for those basic needs.
Pretty sure pricing isn't. Can't US medical companies essentially charge what they like? As long as they don't align with each other to price gouge customers...even though I imagine they do anyway (just very carefully).
So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing.
Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users.
The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.
I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector.
Apple argues that the law was dumb environmentally due to many people having Lightning-cables that wouldn't work in the future, so they obviously can't have intended to do the same changeover at the same time as the EU forced them to
Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that.
I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.
That's not right. They were an early investor in ARM Ltd., but they in no way "helped develop ARM". That was all Acorn. ARM Ltd was created because Apple thought ARM was a good fit for the Newton, but didn't want to be beholden to a competitor, which Acorn was.
Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them.
Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms.
Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think they have to be even broken up due to their monopolistic behaviors.
> Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple?
Apple's dominant market position and abuse of network effects via their proprietary standards, like the one we're talking about from this article.
> Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation
No-one's arguing for any equivalent of that to happen to Apple. Just that when there's an open standard for inter-device communication, they should follow that. Imagine if ASML-manufactured processors wouldn't work with standard DDR5, only with some special memory chips that only ASML could manufacture, that would be the equivalent to what Apple is doing.
Apple should enjoy the profits from when they make better products that win on their merits. But they should have to compete fairly.
probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device
yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C
edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.
To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.
Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?
Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.
That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.
> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽
Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for.
No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.
>iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over.
The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.
Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.
They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime.
USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?
> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
I have seen multiple USB-C ports break on Lenovo and HP laptops. About 1 in every 50 laptops over the span of 2-3 years. I don't know if it was the users fault or a manufacturing issue. But the manufacturers fixed these under the extended warranty.
It might be an issue with the USB-C port used in these laptops since the ports on MacBooks feel less wobbly to me. But in the end this is just speculation and anecdotal.
I did wind up replacing the USB C ports on a 4 year old computer recently because it was dodgy as hell. When i got it under the microscope it the longer bus power pin contacts (and one or two of the others) had been badly worn/squished/stretched in a way that I guess was causing them to bridge to other pins. I assume some USB-C cable had some gunk in the connector which was hard enough to damage the contacts on the center blade, and the user didn't notice (because how often do you look into the end of your USB-C cable?). It probably presented as a cable that wasn't seating right or didn't go all the way in and whatever was inside probably fell out when it was removed and they tried again.
And for what it's worth, damage to the center blade does seem to be a common failure mode for USB-C and mini-usb connectors. Less frequent for something like HDMI but it does seem to happen from time to time. Lightning never felt like it locked in as securely as USB connectors do, but at the same time, every time I saw a damaged lightning connector it was always on the male (and therefore usually cheaper accessory) side.
I've had multiple USB-C chargers broken like this.
Now, admittedly, "being yanked by a robot vacuum and falling on the ground" is outside the design parameters for a port; but I absolutely had USB-C ports fail in a way that Lightning would have not.
(Not the person you're replying to, but also a "Lightning was a better physical connector than USB-C" weirdo.)
At the same time, if the springs on the iPhone-side connector loosen and can't hold onto the cable, you have to replace the whole phone and not just the cable.
So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.
My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface.
There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
Your Pixel 8 could be about two years old. The connector performed way under spec and you should send it in for repair (assuming your are in a country with a 2 year warranty period)
This is probably lint buildup. You can scrape it out with any thin and stiff object like a safety pin.
A small amount of lint gets into the hole. You pack it in when you plug in the cable. Repeat a thousand times and now you have a stiff “plug” of lint that prevents the connector from fully entering your device.
I find it's often lint in the USB-C port. Cleaning it out with a non-conductive tool like a toothpick or a dry toothbrush usually solves it for me when that happenens.
My experience is that plugs from the same manufacturer as the device tend to keep holding tightly, but mixing makers is unreliable. Apple plugs in particular tend to slide out of my samsung phone really easily. I guess whoever speced usbc didn't bother with the details of how it would stay in, and every manufacturer figured out their own solution.
The 10K cycle insertion rating for USB-C is an idealized metric that does not include lateral force, torque, device movement, or real-world wear patterns. These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.
Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.
> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.
> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.
Incorrect. You want springy bits on part that is easily replaceable - the cable. USB-C does that, the springy bits are in the connector, not the socket.
My phone is now 6 years old, zero problems on usb-c connector
Groan. Come on. Cite one. A single "Apple engineer" to support this ridiculous claim of insider knowledge. What year do you think it is?
You understand that the SoC and I/O blocks are largely shared between the Mac and the iPad / iPhone now, right? This invention of some big bifurcation is not reality based. The A14 SoC (which became the foundation for the Mac's M1) had I/O hardware to support USB-C all the ways back to the iPhone 12. Which makes sense as this chipset was used in iPads that came with USB-C.
Pretty weird for hardware that is largely the same to "not like each others standards".
Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial
Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.
I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer).
The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device.
EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.
This was a common trope on Reddit but makes literally zero sense. There are a ton of wired accessories that this would make completely useless overnight, including things like CarPlay.
You probably viewed this as a common trope because you were not aware of the actual source of the rumors. No, these are not claims are not from reddit, they're from Mark Gurman in 2018.
> Apple designers eventually hope to remove most of the external ports and buttons on the iPhone, including the charger, according to people familiar with the company’s work. During the development of the iPhone X, Apple weighed removing the wired charging system entirely. That wasn’t feasible at the time because wireless charging was still slower than traditional methods. [0]
Actual rumors include a prototype of said phone making rounds around the office.
And again, Mark Gurman from 2025:
> "But all of these changes were supposed to be just the tip of the iceberg: Apple had originally hoped to get ever more ambitious with this model... An even bigger idea was to make the Air device Apple’s first completely port-free iPhone. That would mean losing the USB-C connector and going all-in on wireless charging and syncing data with the cloud."
> "But Apple ultimately decided not to adopt a port-free design with the new iPhone, which will still have a USB-C connector. One major reason: There were concerns that removing USB-C would upset European Union regulators, who mandated the iPhone switch to USB-C and are scrutinizing the company’s business practices." [1]
This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?
>> which they were already almost completely done doing
Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
They openly said why, millions upon millions of devices (speakers etc) people wanted to use with lightning connectors. There was never a good time and EU putting a deadline on it gets Apple free of the e-waste accusations.
No one was accusing Apple of e-waste when for decades the world had decided common standards were a great way to reduce e-waste.
Outside of America this has been obvious since the mid 2000s when people complained about a proliferation of chargers with phones because pre-iPhone the non US cellphone market was far more advanced.
Really? Do you remember the user shit storm when they dumped the dock connector and went to lightning? People wouldn’t shut up for years, even though lightning was way way better.
and then they went all-USBC on the MBP before the ecosystem was ready, got absolutely slammed for it, and went back (on magsafe). 4 times bitten, once shy. I'm sure the cynical money reason played a role too, of course, but nobody else is mentioning the 4 times bitten so I felt obliged.
I upgraded my iPad to a USB-C version and discovered I couldn't use my 1st-gen (Lightning) Apple Pencil with it even though it's compatible -- because I first had to buy a special female-female USB-C<->Lightning dongle just to be able to plug it in to pair it. (Even though I can keep using my Lightning charger to charge it separately from my iPad.)
Moving from Lightning to USB-C hasn't been too bad for me since I use wireless charging with e.g. my Lightning AirPods. But the transition is a huge pain. Because of weird cases like the Pencil, it's not even enough to just have a USB-C charging cable and a Lightning charging cable.
The Pencil situation is a disaster. There are at least 3 first party versions plus the 3rd party ones. And when version X + 1 comes out they don’t drop support for version X, they use it in a different product for some stupid reason. Probably because the tooling already exists.
So you can find entire matrices online attempting to explain which iPads support which pencils.
It’s horrible. The Lightning -> USB-C transition is probably one of least objectionable parts of pencil history.
The MBP would only be an example if they were scared of being too new to USB-C on phones. That stopped being possible once a quarter of new phones were USB-C. So they weren't scared of that.
I think this whole narrative being spun here that Good Guy Apple was Being Oppressed by the lowly end users & wanted to do the right thing (be thrown into the briar patch) all along, just never could form the political will for it and needed EU intervention is some insane fucking weird ass made up nonsense. WTF wtf wtf? Surely you must be joking.
Apple has had MfI certification on Apple compatible products for decades & has actively wanted to protect that revenue stream & domain of control. If folks could just plug in devices & have them just work, that would erode their ownership.
And just as bad, it would raise all sorts of questions like "why does this mouse not do anything on my iPhone" and obscure the careful market delineations Apple vigorously has established between its products (which makes people buy more products than they need). Apple never wanted to be a good guy, Apple never wanted to lower itself to the common market of peripherals and standards. Their involvement with USB-C was likely far far far before it was apparent their device teams would have to give up MfI controls.
Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change.
And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users.
In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
> In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector
Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible?
USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.
Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018.
A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years.
The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.
Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17.
Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable.
Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass.
It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified.
Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c
Well they forced a standard that anybody can use to support wirelessly sending files to nearby devices. That's a huge chain and taking a few bricks out of the garden wall.
I literally do not care about the wanky culty Android this Apple that stuff. I just want to plug my phone into my Mac and have it be able to read it, regardless of what phone that is. When someone needs to send me a document, I don't want them to have to change how they send it based on what device I have. Regulation and enforcing common interoperability standards is good for consumers; I don't care whose implementation wins out, just that all my devices support it.
It is also worth noting that Android wasn’t using the standard as well. If they had, this would have been day 0 interoperability for Android phones. Instead, it is a single phone model released a couple months after iOS 26.
And that's how regulations work. The very companies targeted by regulations often design and push for them. By doing so they gain a competitive advantage, price out smaller rivals, and move closer to becoming a monopoly. Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor, talks about this in his book Competitive Strategy.
The moat gets mighty large when the government regulators start making it bigger. That's one of the advantages that the Mag 7 has now - it's not just the scale but it's also the compliance burden for new entrants.
Hah, right? Everyone understands that Apple wouldn't have done anything by themselves if it wasn't for the DMA.
The whole selling point of Apple was that as long as you're inside the ecosystem, you'll get the smoothest experience. Well, now the law says that devices, apps and products from third parties should be able to be used on an iPhone as seamlessly as Apple's own products, of course they wouldn't have given that up willingly.
It is literally correct. My point was I think it implies the EU had to force a totally belligerent Apple (which we’ve certainly seen) instead of Apple already working on this and EU perhaps speeding the timeline a little.
And yet Apple resisted adopting that standard until the EU forced them to.
It’s fascinating seeing all the anti-EU Apple fanbois when arguably Apple’s most successful iPhone change in the last half decade, the switch to USB-C, was an EU decision.
If a law forced Apple to do good for everyone, not just a small group of people, isn't that a good thing? It wasn't exactly that AirDrop got legislated, but thanks to the DMA, AirDrop (and other things) are within scope and they now have to make things more seamless for everyone. Win-win no?
I don't think it was an anything post. You are an Apple customer upset at the status quo, which is understandable, but your post is not.
If "think of the children" feels like manufactured consent for the erosion of rights, spending money supporting Tim "Client Side Scanning" Cook isn't going to yield some moral reprisal from Apple. Emotionally manipulating you into accepting conditional surveillance is part of Apple's security model. They're the "good guys" and they don't need to prove it.
So apparently they use Bluetooth to establish the connection and WiFi for the data transfer. This sounds a lot like the "Alternative MAC/PHY" feature which was added in Bluetooth 3.0 and then removed in Bluetooth 5.3 [1] due to low uptake.
Why didn't the standard Bluetooth way of doing this gain any traction? What was wrong with it?
Great! Apple is happy to use the regular Wifi standard, regular Bluetooth standard, USB standard (which they were "planning to anyway" even tho it perfectly lined up with being forced to). They support media standards like mp4, jpeg, png etc.
ALL companies should be beholden to common standards of interoperability. It infuriates me that I can plug my Android phone into Windows and it reads it just fine but that plugging it into my Mac does nothing because a bunch of executives are circle jerking each other; this stuff isn't good for US, the consumers.
How can we have that cool future where we swipe a media file over towards a person in AR and have it automatically sent to them when we're allowing companies to use the standards they like and dodge ones they don't so that they can create a "platfoooorm" hurr de durr. The "platform" is the entire fucking ecosystem of devices out there.
I wonder if it's related to Apple's change from AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, but AirDrop seems much more reliable on iOS 26. I can send to multiple people at once and they often all succeed, but most importantly, if one transfer fails or is cancelled, I can retry and it works. In older versions of iOS, a failed transfer seemed to block all future attempts until the phone was restarted.
the weird one for me is that if I hit share, and then hit the airdrop target, it doesn't work, but if go into airdrop and then select the same target, then works. Apple, fix your shit, yo.
Regulators never manage to design good products, but they’re weirdly good at accidentally clearing technical roadblocks that incumbents had no incentive to touch.
This is what "interoperability" actually looks like in practice: nobody forces Apple to ship AirDrop-for-Android, they just force them off a proprietary stack and onto a public standard, and suddenly Google can meet them on neutral ground. The EU didn’t create a feature, it removed Apple’s ability to say "we technically can’t."
Also notice the asymmetry: once both sides sit on Wi-Fi Aware, Apple gets basically nothing by embracing Quick Share, but Google and users get a ton from being able to talk to AirDrop. So the market on its own would never converge on this, because the only player who could unlock the value had the least reason to. You need a regulator to make the defection from proprietary to standard mandatory, then "open" just looks like someone finally flipping a bit that was always there.
Google most likely reimplemented AWDL, and the article is wrong. Sure the EU's actions will affect the optics, but Apple will be in the clear if they decide to nuke this.
The more tragic thing is that the US government really does not care about consumers in general - otherwise they would have ensured standards even for the big megacorporations to adhere to.
Yes same, you bump, you put iPhones on to op each other, you enable "findable by other". And still you may be messing around for minutes. Then a larger transfer starts... But fails half way for 6 times.
It's the best way (if it works!) to transfer full quality live images quickly, but otherwise I'd be happier just using Signal.
An additional benefit is that the Wi-Fi standard also means that the weird account requirements on Google's Nearby Share can be avoided by independent implementations (i.e. on Windows or Linux or maybe rooted Android, iOS and macOS already have it of course).
"Contacts only mode" will always be a challenge, but at least the "I just want to share a file without Google watching me" use case is now resolved by Google implementing a standard that doesn't involve them.
Unfortunately, this is Pixel 10 exclusive for now, for some reason. I expect Samsung to pick this up eventually as well, but I'm not sure if Google will be able to backport this tech through Google Play Services the way they did with Nearby Share on older phones.
Qualcomm has confirmed it's coming to Snapdragon phones soon[0], which maybe hints that it's dependent on the SoC drivers? Samsung uses a mix of Snapdragon and their own Exynos, but I can't see them not releasing it to their Snapdragon phones when others do, and then they pretty much have to release it to their Exynos phones too.
An implementation of AWDL on Linux requires a Wi-Fi card that supports "active monitor mode with frame injection". [1] I looked into using it with an Intel Wi-Fi card I had and it appeared mine wasn't supported. I'm guessing the situation is similar on Android in terms of SoC support.
I've ditched AirDrop for LocalSend, which is universally cross-platform (iOS, macOS, Linux, Android) and works very well. It's not a complete substitute, it doesn't work in the case of completely casual sharing between devices that are not connected to a shared WiFi network, however.
I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action.
The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.
Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).
Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
Apple made major contributions to USB-C and adopted it a decade ago in their MacBooks. They were committed to lightning for 10 years starting in 2012-ish, so usb-c was likely inevitable in iOS devices.
However I would preferred a backwards compatibility lightning 2.0 upgrade. Cleaning a usb-c port is a huge pain and they are more prone to pocket lint clogging than lightning.
While I really like the convenience of not having multiple different cables to charge my devices when travelling, I agree with you on cleaning the usb-c port. In that respect, the lightning design was a lot more elegant and made more sense for a pocketable device.
Haven't encountered that yet. But I always try to be extra careful and also look for the thinnest ones I can find. Seems like a product niche right there. Rigid, thin, non-conductive picks.
> The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing
It made all the iPhone docks/speakers/etc. obsolete. The last time that happened, when Apple swapped the old 30 pin connector for lightning, it pissed off a fair number of customers.
This time they could blame the EU which was likely a huge plus.
iPhone docks and speakers were already obsolete. They had a moment during the 30-pin era, but its been long since Bluetooth, Carplay took over in any mainstream use.
Careful on what you wish for. The same regulatory action can be (is) being used for Chat Control (that dropped off the main page for some reason). Ultimately neither power center acts for the general interest.
You're a libertarian but regulatory intervention made everything about the market better and a better world for everyone involved with a relatively small change that was being stubbornly refused by a company for a small marginal benefit to themselves?
Or... You know... We also like watching one giant corporation that benefits from distinctly authoritarian policies get wrecked by another authoritarian entity to the benefit of better competition in the market.
But apparently unless you're a suckup to the authoritarian entity that you like is now a LINO.
Left libertarianism is compatible with such views.
Basically, libertarian on social issues paired with a preference for a decentralized economy, as opposed to a "tankie" (Stalinist) style centrally planned economy.
What is “left libertarianism” supposed to look like? I find this concept baffling. The end result of libertarianism is nothing like what the left is supposed to support.
Sure, because I think that, ultimately excessive regulation stifles innovation. I mean, heck, the EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR because they're worried that it's going to cause them to miss out on the AI boom.
My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.
Your last paragraph doesn't really make you come off as a libertarian at all. If Apple is truly a bad actor, then the libertarian response isn't to have the EU force them to use USB-C on iPhones, it's for people to move away from iPhones to other choices, which means Androids.
“Excessive regulation stifles innovation” is pretty much a tautology. The point of argument is what constitutes “excessive.” Libertarians generally consider almost any amount to be excessive. What you’re describing just sounds like being aware of tradeoffs, which should be true of anyone paying attention.
Next up please do streaming. Chromecast seems so locked down so take AirPlay and make it a standard.
Then instead of just opening up NFC, make Google and Apple Wallet support plugins, so users can have one interface with all their cards but not tied to one payment system.
> If I had to guess why neither of Google’s Quick Share posts mentions Wi-Fi interoperability standards or the DMA, it may be because Google has been complaining about various aspects of the law and its enforcement since before it was even passed
This is telling a lot about US companies complaining about EU laws.
Imagine the worldly gains of allowing such an amazing technology to permeate society. Ah, well, that's against the interests of the shareholders. It's better to lock shit down and earn a dollar than precipitate betterment for human kind. The dollar! All hail!
The DMA also forces them to have interoperable end-to-end encrypted group video call support in like 5 years or something insane. No idea how that's supposed to happen!
The problem isn't E2E encrypted group video calls. FaceTime supports that. The issue is interoperability with E2E encryption.
If Apple says sure, implement this FaceTime spec. Facebook does the same thing, go ahead and implement Messenger video chat.
Now you have the Android NewVideoChat app which supports its own protocol, Facebook's and Apple's. A user with NewVideoChat tries to invite a NewVideoChat user, an Apple user and a Facebook user to a video chat.
Except Facebook Messenger's app doesn't support Apple's Facetime app doesn't support Facebook Messenger, so you run into some issues. Something needs to dupe the stream out to all three services which use radically different payloads and encryption methods - and they have to do it without breaking end-to-end encryption. Do it at the client-side and the Android app users will need to dupe their own streams three times and at least one user will need to relay the other two other streams, with all the bandwidth and latency issues that entails. Do it on the server side and you somehow need to translate between protocols (and possibly codecs!) without decrypting them.
And if your video group chat supports private messaging between a subset of participants, you can end up in a situation where a Facebook user wants to send something to a Facetime user without the NewVideoChat user seeing it.. which is a bit of a problem.
So what is it? Comanagement between EU representatives and Apple employees? It looks like the German model where unions co-manage the companies.
On the paper it looks great, but the problem is the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens. It’s great for my Apple products, but I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
> Comanagement between EU representatives and Apple employees?
Whatever gave you this impression? That’s not what the story is saying at all.
> the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens
It is not supposed to. The EU is a group of states, not citizens. If you want your voice to really count, lobby your national government, which has more say in the councils of ministers or the council of Europe than the MEPs have.
> I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
How big is that "entire lavish class"? Just to know how upset I need to be. Also, which law was "written by lobbies"?
Look, I don't like some of the things the EU is doing and I think Apple should consider (along with other tech companies) selling products tailed to the EU, Asia and rest of the world. In the long-run, it might be cheaper.
That said, they are setting a good example of legislating for tech. We should be doing a lot of that here in the US. I don't need a bulletproof, ultra-secure, end-to-end encrypted, formally verified phone (although that would be nice). As a boring regular person, I want to not have to need all of that because my government will imprison people that violate my rights. But more on-topic, the FTC (EDIT: FCC) exists to regulate among other things, wireless comms, so this would be something they should be legislating.
Although, putting on my tech hat, I need to re-state that I disagree with this move. I want tech companies to experiment and use faster, more secure, more reliable comms tech without having to worry about compatibility. It is in my interest as a consumer.
Lightning was a superior technology to USB-C, we don't have it now because the EU forced apple's hands. I don't want to lose out on good tech. The EU should have instead forced everyone else to use lightning if they want things simpler.
Why is the EU intent on having inferior tech, inferior capability, inferior pay, inferior innovation-friendly environment. They have the power to demand better things and provide them for their people. The compromise isn't needed. At the risk of offending the HN crowd, I'll even say that the EU shouldn't support open-source things unless they are actually the superior tech. You can't eat or pay your bills with ideals. If commercial/properietary tech is better for europeans, that is what the EU should focus on.
I will drive European or Japanese cars that are better than American cars, I don't mind doing the same with tech, except with Europe that's getting more and more rare. What happened to Nokia and Ericsson. NL has ASML, wouldn't it be nice if we had a TSMC competitor in Europe as well? I don't want to keep going on, but I hope my point is clear.
Competition is good, Android shouldn't need to support AirDrop, it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.
Instead competition, the EU is wanting forced mediocrity. They are within their rights for sure, but it isn't the best thing to do.
I only wish they did the same thing with electrical outlets and forced the world to use one mediocre standard :)
> it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.
Okay, so, why don't we see competition in places where it matters, like Airdrop, iMessage and the App Store?
The answer seems to be pretty simple, to me; Apple considers themselves above competition. It doesn't matter if a superior system exists, they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone. It's a lose/lose situation between consumers and the economy, who neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
We do see competition there, iMessage is superior, so many android apps try to emulate it. thunderbolt was around before USB 4, lightning was before USB-C, the Apple appstore is still a model of better quality/security. You can see google trying to emulate that and requiring devs to id themselves (competition isn't always pleasant). Why would you spend making something better, if it doesn't give your company a competitive edge? If you're forced to help your competition have the same capability, where is the ROI?
> Apple considers themselves above competition
In literally every market apple is in, they have intense competition!?
> they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone
Ugh.. yeah.. shouldn't they be allowed to sell things that they believe will sell well? I mean on one hand people complain about cheap devices engineered with planned obsolescence, and then you complain about what.. better quality? If they believe it is a superior system, then certain, I want that as a consumer. Why don't you? And I also thing being able to buy a different phone is great, that means no monopolies, that's what we all want right?
> neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
I am getting a superior hardware and software for apple. What his happening now is, for no amount of money I could possibly earn can I get a good quality product, I have to settle with EU's forced mediocrity even though I don't live in the EU. People who can't afford apple products have alternatives, but that isn't enough for you, you want everyone to get participation trophies? that's what it sounds like, i could be wrong, it sounds like you don't want to feel envious of people who get superior products? Even though there are many android phones more expensive than iPhones, so it isn't even a question of affordability. it's just forced mediocrity. With no upsides to anyone other than people who feel great about "america bad" "middle finger to apple".
Problem is, what you're describing is not competition. Apple is not exposed to any commercial threat, their products like iMessage, Safari and the App Store are artificially segregated from free-market pressures. Nothing can dethrone them, period. The only way to create a true competitor to these apps is to receive Apple's private entitlements. If you cannot understand that, you won't be able to interpret anyone's antitrust allegations against Apple.
Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love. I don't care if you think Apple's brand appeal is diminished by prosecuting their anticompetitive zeal. That's not my problem. You will have to "settle" for it anywhere iPhones are sold, because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Apple is already dethroned, the only market they're doing well at is the US. And even then Android phones are still the majority, apple just tends to make a lot more money in the US. I can't think of a single product where apple is the leader of the market share, but by all means correct me if I'm wrong.
Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, etc.. they're all threats to iMessage. These apps even make themselves the default SMS handler so that the only thing iMessage is good for is native iMessage messages. It isn't distributed outside of Apple ecosystem either unlike its competition, Apple is doing the opposite of dominating the market there.
How is Safari segregated? Most Mac users (including me) install Firefox or Chrome typically. Are you saying Apple doesn't face competition, or are you saying Apple doesn't compete enough (which I don't see how that's a fault?)
I don't think the appstore is particularly more competitive than android's.
The appstore is the only area where there might be legitimate antitrust allegations. Even then, I'm with apple there because it is in the interest of their consumers. You already have the bland and mediocre android, don't ruin apple for the rest of us. Monopoly is exactly what you're advocating for, monopoly of the mediocre and bland. There is absolutley no service or product apple makes where there aren't enough alternatives, or where apple has created an anti-competitive dependency.
> Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love
Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple did it the opposite way, because they make products that last and are durable! with lightning the wear and tear impacts the cable (male) end the most, so it's a matter of replacing cables. with USB-C, the device end needs repair and replacement. Now i'm stuck with your bland mediocre thing. Why am i paying the price for android users' envy?? Same with app store, I don't want b.s. crap android apps, i used android long enough and i hated it, i don't poor quality crap.
Why don't you get that freedom means everyone gets an option, everyone gets to do what they want without harming others. Apple users love apple products. Even when you tell us how android phones have better specs, better hardware, more up to date, we still like apple precisely because of Apple's business practcies that improve the user experience for us. And now you want it to be just like android, why? You have the choice to use android already, why do you need to take away my freedom to use the kind of products apple creates?
I want an extremely closed and gated app store. I want background checks on app developers, forget just ID'ing them. I want it to be a costly endeavor to write iOS apps. I liked lightning, I love iMessage, I recommend it over Signal. I used signal and I have lost a LOT due to it's backup/recovery mess, I've suffered a lot under crappy android apps. airdrop works prefectly, I don't want someone with a buggy/malwared android phone sending airdrops to me, I don't want shoddy android messaging clients sending me imessage messages. Apple is doing what we as its users want. You the majority android users are taking away the choice of the minority apple users.
> because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Of course not, but you were hoping for a mass defection. Apple still makes superior products and we get that it is crappy EU law making that is forcing this. What would I defect to if I didn't like USB-C? You took away the one choice I had. Every android device uses USB-C. Your entire platform here is taking away people's choices and freedoms.
You're not helping anyone get on an equal footing, because by your own admission, they were unequal before right? All you've done is take away the choice of apple's users. Did android messages gain anything with iMessage compatiblity? Did android phones gain anything by apple using usb-c? Do android phones benefit from apple allowing more app stores? No, the only people that benefit are crappy developers that spread their mediocrity everywhere. No apple competitor is gaining a competitive advantage by these measures.
There have always been third party lightning cable makers, I can't think of any major app that isn't available on the app store. Consumers aren't complaining about this. I'll concede that having to store both lightning and usb-c is annoying, but hey.. don't buy apple and avoid USB-C!!?? You literally don't have to use apple products. If product design was considered freedom of speech (is it?) you'd be coercing speech and banning speech you disagree with because it annoys you.
> Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple
I have one of every Apple device category except the HomePod. But this is a horrible take. I can now use my same USB C cables everywhere.
But more importantly, I can use standard USB C peripherals from network adapters USB C external monitors, standard USB C to HDMI cords, plug a USB C storage device in etc
No, I get there are a lot of people like you, but you did have the choice of just using android didn't you? Governments are not ways to enforce your personal preference or force it on others. Apple felt their lightning tech was better, isn't having better tech and an environment where different ideas can be explored better? EU is already anti-innovation, you don't succeed with startups easily there, it's precisely because of this sort of close minded unimaginative thinking.
I don't care if apple required manually splicing wires to charge your phones (safely), how is it the government's right to force them to not do that? The whole point of having a free society is small things like this. I keep posting long posts on HN, so let me cut it short and say that lots of freedoms can be taken away in the name of convenience to others. Companies should be punished for monopolistic practices, but they shouldn't be punished for imagining alternative ways of doing things and succeeding with that. I've had android phones where the USB connector on the phone end broke or degraded, you can hopefully see my perspective as well? How can we have a free society like this if we can't even resolve and tolerate very small differences of opinion like this?
The lightning tech wasn’t better, it could only do USB 2 speeds - yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads.
You’ve had cheap Android phones if you had that problem. Have you heard reports of that being a problem with iPhones?
As far as compatibility, I carry around an external USB C powered external monitor for my laptop. It gets power and video from one cord on a computer.
I can take that same monitor and that same USB C cord and plug it up to my iPhone.
This is me sitting at a Delta lounge watching either Breaking Bad or Better Caul Saul with my phone connected to my second monitor
The iPhone by itself can only power it to 50% brightness. But there you see if I plug in a battery to the second USB C port, it can power the monitor at full brightness and charge my phone.
> yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Those are two separate things.
These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.
In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.
There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.
So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.
Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.
With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.
USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.
USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.
People keep mentioning Wi-Fi Aware with this, but so far haven't seen anyone actually prove that this is the case.
Apple undoubtedly added Wi-Fi Aware support to iOS https://developer.apple.com/documentation/WiFiAware, but its not clear whether iOS actually supports AirDrop over Wi-Fi Aware. Apple clearly hasn't completely dropped AWDL for AirDrop, because you can still AirDrop from iOS 26 to earlier devices.
Note that the Ars Technica article never directly makes the claim that Apple supports Airdrop over Wi-Fi Aware. The title is two independent statements - "The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop" - that's true.
> Google doesn’t mention it in either Quick Share post, but if you’re wondering why it’s suddenly possible for Quick Share to work with AirDrop, it can almost certainly be credited to European Union regulations imposed under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
Again, they're just theorising. They never directly make the claim. Would love on Hacker News for someone to do some Hacking and actually figure it out for real!
I'm fairly sure the article is wrong.
For example, someone found strings in Google's implementation that mentioned AWDL: https://social.treehouse.systems/@nicolas17/1155847323390351...
Also people have mentioned having success Airdropping to macOS devices, which are not listed as being supported on the Wi-Fi Aware page.
In 2020 Google's Project Zero found a zero-click remote RCE in Apple's AWDL implementation. So at least some folks at Google are fully equipped to build a reverse engineered implementation. Discussion on that awhile back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25270184
Yeah, people have confirmed it works with iOS 15, so it seems more likely that Google implemented AWDL.
Both can still be true. The interop may be motivated by the EU regulator's intention so and to stave off further regulation.
> macOS devices, which are not listed as being supported on the Wi-Fi Aware page.
Not listed, but shipped with some Wifi Aware library
/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DeviceToDeviceManager.framework/Plugins/WiFiAwareD2DPlugin.bundle
Just `tcpdump -i awdl0` while Airdrop-ing to a Mac to observe it's still using AWDL. (unless the interface named awdl0 is actually using WiFi Aware...)
Another fun thing to do: `ping6 ff02::1%awdl0`. Pings all nearby Apple devices with AWDL active. Including things like your neighbor's phone that's not even on your local network. (but addresses rotate I believe so can't track persistently)
> (but addresses rotate I believe so can't track persistently)
But maybe you can infer presence tracking the response time? Could be exploited anyway, no?
It’s funny how we’re all trying to piece together the stack from bits and obscure clues. Would be so cool if Apple and Google finally embrace their role as “essential public infrastructure” and release their specs, interoperate, etc.. so one doesn’t end up trapped one way or another when picking a personal device.
> "essential public infrastructure"
If people wanted these devices and services to be public infrastructure, they should be developed and maintained using public funds.
Once something becomes so widely used that almost everyone has one, the public interest is involved. In the same way that cars are essential public infrastructure and have to comply with public safety standards, interoperable fuel nozzles, etc.
It's frustrating how much people want this to be an EU win they'll fabricate evidence. The same happened with RCS in iOS, everybody jumped in to credit it to the EU, when you can find the document spelling out how RCS is a requirement for China.
Don't forget that Apple is feeling sore and playing the petulant child in their PR regarding EU regulations, especially regarding the digital markets act. They don't want to appear to give in the EU, so I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Apple doesn't want to admit that the EU forced them.
There is very little literature about Chinese requirements rolled out
and when there is, its talked about as American tech companies bowing to an authoritarian regime as opposed to fighting a burgeoning market force acting on behalf of consumers and the American tech companies losing that fight
the latter is how the EU work is syndicated
in between is that there likely is no fight with Chinese regulators alongside an unwillingness to alter access to that market
I don't care which sovereign state or union forces the trillion dollar tech giant to behave. I'm just glad it happened. And I applaud China if this was their victory.
I want it to happen with a thousand times more intensity for Apple and Google.
We should own these devices. We shouldn't be subsistence farmers on the most important device category in the world.
They need to be opened up to competition, standards, right to repair, privacy, web app installs, browser choice, messaging, etc. etc.
They shouldn't be strong arming tiny developers or the entire automotive industry. It's vastly unfair. And this strip mining impacts us as consumers.
The sad thing is that you and the person you are arguing with are both right: Apple and Google are lock-in monopolists, and the legacy telcos were much worse monopolists (remember paying for ringtones?), and the car manufacturers want to foist terrible software on people with their own brand of lock-in.
Really there should be something like DIN rails for car electronics other than audio, so you can just swap out the manufacturer kit if you don't like it. Then there would be an actual market.
(DIN being a German standards body..)
> They shouldn't be strong arming [...] the entire automotive industry.
Yes they should, the automotive industry is much shittier. I have a 23 Chevy Bolt EUV with wireless CarPlay. Chevy/GM have been emailing and snail mailing me relentlessly trying to get me to pay for their $150 update to my car's navigation maps, which no longer work in my vehicle (presumably because they're out of date). This is quite the deal, according to their marketing materials, but I won't be paying for it because I've never used those maps thanks to CarPlay.
With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
> With all this emphasis they're putting on upselling these $150 map updates, it doesn't take a genius to understand why GM is no longer making vehicles with CarPlay or Android Auto.
Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition.
Because a trillion dollar duopoly gets to spend a billion dollars on mapping software and give it away completely for free as part of an ecosystem / platform play, which they then use to strong arm automotive manufacturers. If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150. More car companies should ban Apple and Google.
Fuck Apple and Google. They are not the heroes in this story. They're not Robin Hood here, even if that's what they're masquerading as. They're the child-enslaving "Land of Toys" from Pinocchio - they're using you and lured you in with a promise of freedom, but they have an ulterior motive.
All of that "freedom" just gets added to the purchase price of your car, and you don't even realize it. You also get Google ads for McDonalds and shit.
Before CarPlay and Android Auto we had TomTom for $130 and map updates costing about $40. The map updates from car manufacturers were always sold at a premium.
I bet Google Maps pays for itself through ads alone. In addition Google Maps gains a lot of invaluable data from its users like new businesses, reviews, pictures, updated opening times, traffic data and more. So no Google Maps isn't really "free" it's paid for by its users with ads and free labor to improve the mapping data.
Having the users split between different navigation software is a worse user experience because the mapping data will be worse. So I welcome a monopoly in this case.
The hard work of mapping is done by the government in most countries and paid for by the tax payers. So you are just paying the car company to convert the mapping data you already paid for into their proprietary format.
CarPlay doesn't show me ads for McDonald's, it doesn't show me ads at all.
Yet :(
When standalone GPS units for $500 were popular the big car manufacturers were still trying to sell GPS as a $2000 option. We've seen time and time again car companies will charge whatever they can get away with. So i'm very skeptical that maps actually cost $150 for the companies that charged me $800 to enable bluetooth calling.
When companies compete, consumers win. Don't make the error of thinking that because they're doing it for selfish reasons, it doesn't benefit you.
> If you had to bear the true cost, it would be $150.
That might be true, but it probably isn't. A larger company can spread the cost out over a larger number of customers, meaning the cost per customer is lower.
> Because cars are a low margin, high capital business with ruthless competition.
Then why are they making such terrible carplay systems?
The EU mindset in a nutshell. It doesn’t matter how shitty and expensive the solution is, as long as they get to say they owned big tech.
Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too.
Big tech is literally a machine putting a ceiling on your ability to build.
They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules.
If you get big enough, they self-fund an internal team to compete with you. Or they offer to buy you for less than you're worth. If you don't accept, they buy your competitor.
Capitalism should be brutal. Giant lions that can't compete should starve and give way to nimble new competition.
You shouldn't be able to use your 100+ business units to subsidize the takeover of an entirely unrelated market.
They are an invasive species and are growing into everything they can without antitrust hedge trimming. Instead of lean, starving lions, they're lion fish infesting the Gulf of Mexico. They're feasting upon the entire ecosystem and putting pressure on healthy competition.
Your own capital rewards are cut short because of their scale.
Do you like not being able to write apps and distribute them to customers? It's okay to pay their fee, jump through their hoops, be locked to release trains, pay 30%, forced to lose your customer relationship, forced to use their payment and user rails, forced to update on their whim to meet their new standards - on their cadence and not yours?
Do you like having competitors able to pay money to put themselves in front of customers searching for your brand name? On the web and in the app stores? So you have to pay to even enjoy the name recognition you earned? On top of the 30% gross sales tax you already pay? And those draconian rules?
That's fucking bullshit.
We need more competition, not less.
Winning should not be reaching scale and squatting forever. You should be forced to run on the treadmill constantly until someone nibbles away at your market. That's healthy.
Competition from smaller players should be brutal and unending.
That is how we build robust, anti-fragile markets that maximally benefit consumers. That is how we ensure capital rewards accrue to the active innovators.
Apple and Google are lion fish. It's time for the DOJ, FTC, and every sovereign nation to cull them back so that the ecosystem can thrive once more.
> They tax and control everything, lock down distribution, prevent you from operating without rules.
You seem to be arguing that the EU should be doing that though. What about those of us who quite like the way Apple does things right now? I'm happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points, I quite like someone to be acting as a firewall between my device and the unfettered soup that is stuff out on the internet.
Apple's product is a well curated walled garden. I certainly understand why there are a lot of people on HN who don't like that - they see 30% that they can't claim. But one of the reasons Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience.
>> Apple is so successful is because they know how to create a great phone experience.
I disagree, may be they were at some time. Now they are successful because the walls of the well are so high. It is insanely difficult for us frogs to jump. Happy that governments are trying to bring those walls down
>> I am happy to pay extra for a lot of your dot points. Good for you because you trust them. Problem is I am not. I dont trust apple/google to make that decision for me. But they dont give that choice. They are making you sacrificing freedom, choice by masking them self as secure. But underlying motive is profits and control.
I heard a story that apple asked meta for comission on ads , when meta rejected they introduced features to remove access to usage metrics to 3rd party apps. If meta agreed , you might never see the privacy features app introduced.
The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.
> The security you are thinking is a believable mirage. There are several users who have lost thousands of dollars to scammy appstore in app purchases/subsciptions and apple is doing shit to stop this.
And the plan to make this the consensus view is to ban Apple-style curated app stores. That seems to be cheating. When Apple convinced me their App store model was better than the alternative they had to use, y'know, persuasion.
Nokia sorta died, but at the time back in the 2000s Apple had to get through the entire phone industry to establish the iPhone. If the Europeans had any idea how to manage this sort of ecosystem they'd still be running the show. They had an amazing market position to begin with. They flubbed it because no-one in the entire continent seems to know how to run an app store! Now they're legislating their bad ideas in. It is a very European approach to commercial innovation and success.
yes I agree, but we need to change with the age. in early 2000's it is hard to distribute apps/software, and 30% commission made sense.
now it is not, there are several people/companies who can make the app distribution better, efficient for all consumers. they can bring it down to a fraction (apple itself has by now bought it to a fraction of what it costs in 2000).only reason they are not passed down to consumer is because they made sure there is no competition (by force(google paying samsung to not develop its app store) or by design (Apple limiting 3rd party installs and discouraging webapps) - basically how a monopoly/duopoly behaves). it is bad for us consumers
if apple has developed all the tools libraries itself from scratch , put hardwork and sweat into it, i wont have a issue. we all know thats not the case and how much opensource tools helped.
> Okay, so you're a hyper capitalist. Good, I dig that. Me too.
Nothing in GP's comment gave any indication that they were a "hyper capitalist". You're just being emotionally manipulative, disingenuous, and acting in bad faith. This is categorically inappropriate for HN.
Same with usb-c when Apple was one of the main drivers of usb-c adoption.
Apple had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting usb-c on the truly mobile devices.
Apple was clearly moving towards usbc (which they helped develop). Their laptops and iPad pros had moved along with the pro phones. To think the EU the reason usbc came to the iPhone is ignoring the clear path Apple was on. At best they put it in the rest of the phone line a generation early.
Any fight that Apple put up was performative and them not wanting any sort of precedence to be set.
Apple usually gatekeeps their EU required features with a strong region lock.
If Airdrop was changed to use Wifi-Aware due to EU regulation it very likely wouldn't be enabled worldwide.
Oh, look what "over-regulation" does, forcing companies to comply to standards so they can't vendor lock-in their users (this happened with the iphone charging port too, from the apple specific port to usb-c).
Guess this type of consumer-benefic changes wouldn't happen in the land of "freedom".
It's likely that without laws such as the DMCA, there would already be easier, legally legitimate ways to circumvent Apples technology preventing interoperability. So as usual the new regulations try to cancel out the problems caused by the previous regulation, while having their own side effects that require future regulation to cancel out, ad infinitum.
That’s unlikely.
A positive effect from regulation does not rebut the general argument against government regulation of industry.
The problem with regulation isn’t that there are never any positive effects, of course there are.
The problem is it’s impossible to reliably avoid adding substantial friction to life via overly broad regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, or outdated but still-in-effect regulation that is not applicable but has to be followed anyway, at least.
If this only bothered huge companies then I would say cost of doing business, who cares, etc, but it actually affects things like how cities and towns are designed, how expensive housing is, how expensive medical treatment is, etc.
It's unclear exactly what you're arguing, but I think if you are arguing that, because of the unavoidable substantial friction caused by regulation, we shouldn't have any regulation of industry at all... I think it's trivial to find examples where banning all regulation of industry would make the world a much, much worse place. Much worse than the friction.
Even though overly broad regulation is a risk, I don't believe little/no regulation is an option either. I don't think the US's consumer protection mechanisms work, and I'm happy to accept the downsides of the EU's systems that come with the upsides of regulation.
I mean, housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated and so the capital exploits the poor who can't do otherwise for those basic needs.
You defeated your own argument ? Thanks !
> housing and medical treatment are more expensive in the US because the market is unregulated
Is it really unregulated though?
Pretty sure pricing isn't. Can't US medical companies essentially charge what they like? As long as they don't align with each other to price gouge customers...even though I imagine they do anyway (just very carefully).
So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing.
Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here
Apple said from the day that they made lightning cables that it would be supported for 10 years. They literally contractually guaranteed that to third party manufacturers in exchange for them creating a massive availability of cables for Apple users.
The EU “forced them” to switch to the standard they helped develop (USB C) on the 11th year after developing lighting. I’m sure it was all the EUs doing.
I haven't seen Apple say anything like that, all I saw were analysts saying that Apple's long term commitment to the format meant that you could expect a decade or so of lifetime like the previous 30pin connector.
Do you have a citation for what you're saying?
Chinese cable manufacturers don't need contract guarantees to compete for the lucrative iPhone user market...
The cables have proprietary chips that need to be purchased from apple. And the target is companies that join their "Made For Apple" (MFI) program.
Those proprietary chips were cloned very quickly...
https://www.wsj.com/video/apple-executive-on-adoption-of-usb...
Apple argues that the law was dumb environmentally due to many people having Lightning-cables that wouldn't work in the future, so they obviously can't have intended to do the same changeover at the same time as the EU forced them to
Apple also helped develop ARM, but I believe nobody likes to talk about that.
I wonder when the Europe is going to open up European companies like ASML, who are pretty much the de facto monopolies in their field. I believe the Nexperia incident showed that there's also a lot of political and national reasons behind such decisions, not just creating open and fair markets.
That's not right. They were an early investor in ARM Ltd., but they in no way "helped develop ARM". That was all Acorn. ARM Ltd was created because Apple thought ARM was a good fit for the Newton, but didn't want to be beholden to a competitor, which Acorn was.
Apple is the leader of nearly all new developments to the ARM ISA, which has evolved considerably since Acorn died.
Who is stopping someone from competing against ASML?
Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple?
Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation, but wait they’re an incredible company that dominated the field with their hard work and diligence, so it’s not fair for them.
Similarly, the open markets should apply to everyone, not just dominant American firms.
Though, I’m not saying they’re innocent and I think they have to be even broken up due to their monopolistic behaviors.
ASML isn't selling hundreds of millions of units to people like you and me.
> Who’s stopping anyone from competing with Apple?
Apple's dominant market position and abuse of network effects via their proprietary standards, like the one we're talking about from this article.
> Let’s force ASML to open up its manufacturing line and cancel their patents for squandering innovation
No-one's arguing for any equivalent of that to happen to Apple. Just that when there's an open standard for inter-device communication, they should follow that. Imagine if ASML-manufactured processors wouldn't work with standard DDR5, only with some special memory chips that only ASML could manufacture, that would be the equivalent to what Apple is doing.
Apple should enjoy the profits from when they make better products that win on their merits. But they should have to compete fairly.
ASML provides their devices to any (eligible) company.
If you want an Apple analogy, imagine ASML requiring that they get 30% of all the income generated by devices that use ASML-produced chips.
That did turn a huge number of chargers and accessories into e-waste though...
probably offset by travellers hauling less proprietary cables with them on holidays/business trips/commutes, i now travel with basically one cable to charge almost every device
yes, this is a little tongue in cheek, but i do appreciate the standardization around USB-C
edit: people need to just admit their lives got better with this forced change. (this is not a reply to you, general observation)
Chargers of that era typically had a USB A port and can still be used with an A to C cable
Lightning is just the snowcap on a mountain of Mini- and Micro-USB.
With the benefit of reduced waste in the future, though
Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede.
To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros and Air to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
They had Macs on USB-C for like 7 years before the iPhone. It was going to stay like that. Mac on USB-C meant more dongles to sell, iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽ How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
Apple came under fire when they moved from 30-pin connectors to Lightning because people wanted to keep their 30-pin connectors. At the time, Apple said that they wouldn’t make people switch for another decade. They switched to USB-C eleven years later.
Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?
Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.
That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.
> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?
A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions
> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽
Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.
Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for.
This is business 101.
There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning.
And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?
No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.
>iPhone on Lightning meant cable fees and control.
Strange, then, that Apple already moved the iPad Pro and iPad Air to USB-C, right? Didn't they get the memo about "cable fees and control"? It's almost like they were incrementally moving all their platforms over.
The cable fees conspiracy has always been a weird one. At the absolute highest, MFi fees were estimated at some $80M per year. Do you know how utterly irrelevant that number is to Apple? It's like 0.02% of their revenue. Far more logically they literally intended it as a quality assurance given that the company was very focused on user satisfaction.
Apple probably wouldn’t have changed to usbc for their phones. Lightning was a mobile phone / other development, whilst usbc and its contributions came from their Mac department.
They did not like each others standards. I know Apple engineers working on the phone who dislike the change even up to this day…
Did they give reasons for why they don't like the change?
USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime. The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
> USB-C is a worse mechanical connector for a device plugged in thousands of times over its lifetime.
USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?
> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
> This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares.
The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....
Have you ever seen either kind of port break on the inside?
This speculation is just as weak without any evidence.
I have seen multiple USB-C ports break on Lenovo and HP laptops. About 1 in every 50 laptops over the span of 2-3 years. I don't know if it was the users fault or a manufacturing issue. But the manufacturers fixed these under the extended warranty.
It might be an issue with the USB-C port used in these laptops since the ports on MacBooks feel less wobbly to me. But in the end this is just speculation and anecdotal.
I did wind up replacing the USB C ports on a 4 year old computer recently because it was dodgy as hell. When i got it under the microscope it the longer bus power pin contacts (and one or two of the others) had been badly worn/squished/stretched in a way that I guess was causing them to bridge to other pins. I assume some USB-C cable had some gunk in the connector which was hard enough to damage the contacts on the center blade, and the user didn't notice (because how often do you look into the end of your USB-C cable?). It probably presented as a cable that wasn't seating right or didn't go all the way in and whatever was inside probably fell out when it was removed and they tried again.
And for what it's worth, damage to the center blade does seem to be a common failure mode for USB-C and mini-usb connectors. Less frequent for something like HDMI but it does seem to happen from time to time. Lightning never felt like it locked in as securely as USB connectors do, but at the same time, every time I saw a damaged lightning connector it was always on the male (and therefore usually cheaper accessory) side.
I've had multiple USB-C chargers broken like this.
Now, admittedly, "being yanked by a robot vacuum and falling on the ground" is outside the design parameters for a port; but I absolutely had USB-C ports fail in a way that Lightning would have not.
(Not the person you're replying to, but also a "Lightning was a better physical connector than USB-C" weirdo.)
At the same time, if the springs on the iPhone-side connector loosen and can't hold onto the cable, you have to replace the whole phone and not just the cable.
So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.
My Pixel 8 certainly hasn't gone through 10k cycles and it barely holds on to any USB-C connector I put inside it. They all fall out even when laying still on a flat surface.
There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
Your Pixel 8 could be about two years old. The connector performed way under spec and you should send it in for repair (assuming your are in a country with a 2 year warranty period)
Unfortunately we're nearing the anniversary of the warranty's expiration.
My lightning connector on my iPhone 12 is completely unreliable - I need to twist the phone against the cable to get it to change.
Fortunately MagSafe works fine!
This is probably lint buildup. You can scrape it out with any thin and stiff object like a safety pin.
A small amount of lint gets into the hole. You pack it in when you plug in the cable. Repeat a thousand times and now you have a stiff “plug” of lint that prevents the connector from fully entering your device.
I find it's often lint in the USB-C port. Cleaning it out with a non-conductive tool like a toothpick or a dry toothbrush usually solves it for me when that happenens.
My own empirical evidence suggests that USB-C ports stop holding tightly onto cables after light to moderate use.
To be fair, Lightning ports were prone to being clogged with lint, but that was fixable in twenty seconds with a safety pin.
My experience is that plugs from the same manufacturer as the device tend to keep holding tightly, but mixing makers is unreliable. Apple plugs in particular tend to slide out of my samsung phone really easily. I guess whoever speced usbc didn't bother with the details of how it would stay in, and every manufacturer figured out their own solution.
exactly!
The 10K cycle insertion rating for USB-C is an idealized metric that does not include lateral force, torque, device movement, or real-world wear patterns. These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.
I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.
Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.
> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.
> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.
*moot point
Incorrect. You want springy bits on part that is easily replaceable - the cable. USB-C does that, the springy bits are in the connector, not the socket.
My phone is now 6 years old, zero problems on usb-c connector
"I know Apple engineers working on the phone"
Groan. Come on. Cite one. A single "Apple engineer" to support this ridiculous claim of insider knowledge. What year do you think it is?
You understand that the SoC and I/O blocks are largely shared between the Mac and the iPad / iPhone now, right? This invention of some big bifurcation is not reality based. The A14 SoC (which became the foundation for the Mac's M1) had I/O hardware to support USB-C all the ways back to the iPhone 12. Which makes sense as this chipset was used in iPads that came with USB-C.
Pretty weird for hardware that is largely the same to "not like each others standards".
The I/O blocks are similar, but very much not the same between the different Axy/Mz chips.
They're different even between A19 Pro in an iPhone Air and the one in 17 Pros! The Air one doesn't support 10Gbps USB-C.
It's conceivably politically incorrect to use this reference, but Apple was begging the EU not to throw them into that briar patch.
Begging? Apple filed a couple of light objections -- basically a "don't regulate us, bro" -- and then moved on. Their resistance was laughably superficial
Look, Apple is a predatory, extraordinarily greedy company, but these sorts of "thanks EU!" discussions are a riot. Thanks EU, for making Apple support a clone of an Apple feature that didn't exist until Apple made it, and for "forcing" Apple to transition their line to USB-C, which they were already almost completely done doing.
I think you missed GP’s point. The briar patch is a reference to the story of Br’er Rabbit, which involves pretending to object to a punishment that one really doesn’t mind at all (and might even prefer).
The GP is suggesting that Apple was more than happy to have this mandate. I tend to agree: they wanted to switch the iPhone to USB-C anyway, but there’s always people who are going to be upset that their Lightning accessories no longer work or need an adapter. But this way they can say that the EU forced their hand. They get what they wanted all along, but they also get a scapegoat who can take the blame for the remaining downsides.
My understanding is that Apple didn't add USB-C to iPhones because they planned to remove all ports from the iPhone entirely. They envisioned it as a wireless only device.
EU regulation stopped this from happening, and now once they added USB-C it's difficult to take this feature away. I predict we'll be stuck with the USB-C port and form factor on most phones for the next decade.
This was a common trope on Reddit but makes literally zero sense. There are a ton of wired accessories that this would make completely useless overnight, including things like CarPlay.
And for what?
You probably viewed this as a common trope because you were not aware of the actual source of the rumors. No, these are not claims are not from reddit, they're from Mark Gurman in 2018.
> Apple designers eventually hope to remove most of the external ports and buttons on the iPhone, including the charger, according to people familiar with the company’s work. During the development of the iPhone X, Apple weighed removing the wired charging system entirely. That wasn’t feasible at the time because wireless charging was still slower than traditional methods. [0]
Actual rumors include a prototype of said phone making rounds around the office.
And again, Mark Gurman from 2025:
> "But all of these changes were supposed to be just the tip of the iceberg: Apple had originally hoped to get ever more ambitious with this model... An even bigger idea was to make the Air device Apple’s first completely port-free iPhone. That would mean losing the USB-C connector and going all-in on wireless charging and syncing data with the cloud."
> "But Apple ultimately decided not to adopt a port-free design with the new iPhone, which will still have a USB-C connector. One major reason: There were concerns that removing USB-C would upset European Union regulators, who mandated the iPhone switch to USB-C and are scrutinizing the company’s business practices." [1]
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-21/why-apple...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-03-16/apple-...
This is completely illogical. There is no world that wireless charging or data transfer was going to be as good as wired. Was the iPhone all the sudden not going to work in the millions of cars that had wired CarPlay?
I share that view, but I don't think Apple would care. I mean Ethernet is way better than Wifi, yet the iPhones don't have an Ethernet port.
My statements are substantiated by sources going back almost a decade. See my other comment for details.
And when you view what Apple is doing from their long-term vision of the iPhone becoming a transparent piece of glass, it starts making sense.
>> which they were already almost completely done doing
Honest question - why did they stick with lighting on iphones for so long, given that usb-c has been ubiquitus on phones for years before that point. I mean we can sit here and say "duh apple was going to do it anyway" but like.....why didn't they? Why did samsung have usb-c phones long before apple?
They openly said why, millions upon millions of devices (speakers etc) people wanted to use with lightning connectors. There was never a good time and EU putting a deadline on it gets Apple free of the e-waste accusations.
No one was accusing Apple of e-waste when for decades the world had decided common standards were a great way to reduce e-waste.
Outside of America this has been obvious since the mid 2000s when people complained about a proliferation of chargers with phones because pre-iPhone the non US cellphone market was far more advanced.
Really? Do you remember the user shit storm when they dumped the dock connector and went to lightning? People wouldn’t shut up for years, even though lightning was way way better.
Because they were getting a reputation for churning the ports too quickly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyTA33HQZLA&t=19s
and then they went all-USBC on the MBP before the ecosystem was ready, got absolutely slammed for it, and went back (on magsafe). 4 times bitten, once shy. I'm sure the cynical money reason played a role too, of course, but nobody else is mentioning the 4 times bitten so I felt obliged.
Seriously.
I upgraded my iPad to a USB-C version and discovered I couldn't use my 1st-gen (Lightning) Apple Pencil with it even though it's compatible -- because I first had to buy a special female-female USB-C<->Lightning dongle just to be able to plug it in to pair it. (Even though I can keep using my Lightning charger to charge it separately from my iPad.)
Moving from Lightning to USB-C hasn't been too bad for me since I use wireless charging with e.g. my Lightning AirPods. But the transition is a huge pain. Because of weird cases like the Pencil, it's not even enough to just have a USB-C charging cable and a Lightning charging cable.
I wouldn’t blame USB-C for that, personally.
The Pencil situation is a disaster. There are at least 3 first party versions plus the 3rd party ones. And when version X + 1 comes out they don’t drop support for version X, they use it in a different product for some stupid reason. Probably because the tooling already exists.
So you can find entire matrices online attempting to explain which iPads support which pencils.
It’s horrible. The Lightning -> USB-C transition is probably one of least objectionable parts of pencil history.
The MBP would only be an example if they were scared of being too new to USB-C on phones. That stopped being possible once a quarter of new phones were USB-C. So they weren't scared of that.
I think this whole narrative being spun here that Good Guy Apple was Being Oppressed by the lowly end users & wanted to do the right thing (be thrown into the briar patch) all along, just never could form the political will for it and needed EU intervention is some insane fucking weird ass made up nonsense. WTF wtf wtf? Surely you must be joking.
Apple has had MfI certification on Apple compatible products for decades & has actively wanted to protect that revenue stream & domain of control. If folks could just plug in devices & have them just work, that would erode their ownership.
And just as bad, it would raise all sorts of questions like "why does this mouse not do anything on my iPhone" and obscure the careful market delineations Apple vigorously has established between its products (which makes people buy more products than they need). Apple never wanted to be a good guy, Apple never wanted to lower itself to the common market of peripherals and standards. Their involvement with USB-C was likely far far far before it was apparent their device teams would have to give up MfI controls.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program
Apple's resistance was presumably user inertia. Users had billions of cables and accessories for lightning, and Apple saw during a prior transition that people get really pissed off about this sort of change.
And let's be real about Samsung et al -- before USB-C, they were using the utter dogshit micro USB connector (funfact -- this terrible connector became prevalent because the EU made a voluntary commitment with manufacturers to adopt it). micro-USB is a horrible connector from a user-experience and reliability perspective. USB-C was a massive, massive upgrade for those users.
In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector. Even today to most Apple users the switch from lightning to USB-C was just a sideways move.
> In Apple land, everyone already had a bidirectional, reliable connector
Wait, I thought the Apple 30-pin connector was not reversible?
USB-C has been out for over a decade now. There was only a small window of about two years where iphones had lightning and other phones did not yet have usb-c.
GP meant Lightning. It was reversible.
You are correct, the dock connector for was not.
And they couldn’t go to USB-C instead of Lightning initially as Lightning came out first.
Samsung released the first USB-C Galaxy S device five years after the iPhone moved to lightning (2012 vs 2017). They had Galaxy A devices on micro USB a year later in 2018.
A couple of devices like the Pixel (4 years after lightning - 2012 vs 2016) got it a bit earlier, but no, it wasn't two years.
The iPhone rocking a massively better connector half a decade earlier than the vast majority of the competition is legitimately a thing.
EU kinda failed with it once before, they pushed for phone vendors to get to common standard https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/memo_1...
didn't work, apple still did their own thing so EU went "ok, fuck you, usb-c"
People spent a whole decade complaining about the iPod dock -> Lightning change.
I'd wait to blame the EU also.
> but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede
There is no reason to believe this at all given how hard Apple fought the EU on this.
Apple likely didn't want the precedent or bad press of the EU mandating changes in their supply chain.
Absolutely. It is excessively obvious and I don’t understand how not much more of a common take that is.
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Apple still has not moved iPhones to usb c outside of Europe so I'd seems like they're not gonna "just do it"
What are you talking about? The iPhone has been using USB-C globally since the iPhone 15 in 2023.
Heh. Maybe I just haven't met anyone with such a new iPhone yet
Apple used USB-C on the iPhone 15 and 16 without being forced to do so. If Apple was indeed forced to use USB-C they would have postponed it to the 17.
Do you also think Apple was forced to use USB-C on the iPad and MacBook?
Apple cerifies/recieves licensencing fee for every thunderbolt cable. Apple only did move to usb-c when backlash is so high and eu law will certainly pass.
It is good for their pr to advertise that they moved to usbc because they wanted to rather than forced to by a government.Apple still tries/atleast tried to control usbc cable usage for iphones. Cables need to get certified.
Apple supported usbc on mac because it is superior and the impact to their revenue is very low. It is also jump from usb-a to usb -c
Wow , you need lot of homework to do. You missed the whole timeline of events, backlash with apple and usbc and just looking at headlines.
Or either misrepresenting the facts because you are a fan boy of a trillion dollar company. Please dont if its latter.
Well they forced a standard that anybody can use to support wirelessly sending files to nearby devices. That's a huge chain and taking a few bricks out of the garden wall.
I literally do not care about the wanky culty Android this Apple that stuff. I just want to plug my phone into my Mac and have it be able to read it, regardless of what phone that is. When someone needs to send me a document, I don't want them to have to change how they send it based on what device I have. Regulation and enforcing common interoperability standards is good for consumers; I don't care whose implementation wins out, just that all my devices support it.
Apple was forced to upstream the standard because the writing was on the wall so may as well preempt it.
It’d also a benefit for Apple, since once upstreamed it shares the maintenance burden across all participants.
It is also worth noting that Android wasn’t using the standard as well. If they had, this would have been day 0 interoperability for Android phones. Instead, it is a single phone model released a couple months after iOS 26.
And that's how regulations work. The very companies targeted by regulations often design and push for them. By doing so they gain a competitive advantage, price out smaller rivals, and move closer to becoming a monopoly. Michael Porter, Harvard Business School professor, talks about this in his book Competitive Strategy.
The moat gets mighty large when the government regulators start making it bigger. That's one of the advantages that the Mag 7 has now - it's not just the scale but it's also the compliance burden for new entrants.
I feel like your take is what an Apple PR person might say in order to downplay Apple's defeat.
Hah, right? Everyone understands that Apple wouldn't have done anything by themselves if it wasn't for the DMA.
The whole selling point of Apple was that as long as you're inside the ecosystem, you'll get the smoothest experience. Well, now the law says that devices, apps and products from third parties should be able to be used on an iPhone as seamlessly as Apple's own products, of course they wouldn't have given that up willingly.
The headline is 100% correct.
It is literally correct. My point was I think it implies the EU had to force a totally belligerent Apple (which we’ve certainly seen) instead of Apple already working on this and EU perhaps speeding the timeline a little.
And yet Apple resisted adopting that standard until the EU forced them to.
It’s fascinating seeing all the anti-EU Apple fanbois when arguably Apple’s most successful iPhone change in the last half decade, the switch to USB-C, was an EU decision.
The EU: Sacrificing constituents' privacy rights with one hand, while courageously fighting for the sacred right to AirDrop with the other.
If a law forced Apple to do good for everyone, not just a small group of people, isn't that a good thing? It wasn't exactly that AirDrop got legislated, but thanks to the DMA, AirDrop (and other things) are within scope and they now have to make things more seamless for everyone. Win-win no?
The national governments are to blame, not the EU.
Don't worry, the United States is always eager to prove that you can neglect both consumer rights and user privacy at the same time.
This wasn't a "meanwhile, the U.S. is good" post. Let's hope this massive AirDrop "win" eases the sting of the rights that the EU is eroding.
I don't think it was an anything post. You are an Apple customer upset at the status quo, which is understandable, but your post is not.
If "think of the children" feels like manufactured consent for the erosion of rights, spending money supporting Tim "Client Side Scanning" Cook isn't going to yield some moral reprisal from Apple. Emotionally manipulating you into accepting conditional surveillance is part of Apple's security model. They're the "good guys" and they don't need to prove it.
So apparently they use Bluetooth to establish the connection and WiFi for the data transfer. This sounds a lot like the "Alternative MAC/PHY" feature which was added in Bluetooth 3.0 and then removed in Bluetooth 5.3 [1] due to low uptake.
Why didn't the standard Bluetooth way of doing this gain any traction? What was wrong with it?
[1] https://www.bluetooth.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Bluetoo...
Great! Apple is happy to use the regular Wifi standard, regular Bluetooth standard, USB standard (which they were "planning to anyway" even tho it perfectly lined up with being forced to). They support media standards like mp4, jpeg, png etc.
ALL companies should be beholden to common standards of interoperability. It infuriates me that I can plug my Android phone into Windows and it reads it just fine but that plugging it into my Mac does nothing because a bunch of executives are circle jerking each other; this stuff isn't good for US, the consumers.
How can we have that cool future where we swipe a media file over towards a person in AR and have it automatically sent to them when we're allowing companies to use the standards they like and dodge ones they don't so that they can create a "platfoooorm" hurr de durr. The "platform" is the entire fucking ecosystem of devices out there.
I wonder if it's related to Apple's change from AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, but AirDrop seems much more reliable on iOS 26. I can send to multiple people at once and they often all succeed, but most importantly, if one transfer fails or is cancelled, I can retry and it works. In older versions of iOS, a failed transfer seemed to block all future attempts until the phone was restarted.
Is there any proof that this change actually happened?
Have you tried the NFC-bumping the tops of the iPhones together yet? So far I’ve had superb success rate on iOS18.
the weird one for me is that if I hit share, and then hit the airdrop target, it doesn't work, but if go into airdrop and then select the same target, then works. Apple, fix your shit, yo.
Yep seen this before too.
Pretty sure this was debunked: https://androiddev.social/@MishaalRahman/115593737977641823
Regulators never manage to design good products, but they’re weirdly good at accidentally clearing technical roadblocks that incumbents had no incentive to touch.
This is what "interoperability" actually looks like in practice: nobody forces Apple to ship AirDrop-for-Android, they just force them off a proprietary stack and onto a public standard, and suddenly Google can meet them on neutral ground. The EU didn’t create a feature, it removed Apple’s ability to say "we technically can’t."
Also notice the asymmetry: once both sides sit on Wi-Fi Aware, Apple gets basically nothing by embracing Quick Share, but Google and users get a ton from being able to talk to AirDrop. So the market on its own would never converge on this, because the only player who could unlock the value had the least reason to. You need a regulator to make the defection from proprietary to standard mandatory, then "open" just looks like someone finally flipping a bit that was always there.
Google most likely reimplemented AWDL, and the article is wrong. Sure the EU's actions will affect the optics, but Apple will be in the clear if they decide to nuke this.
If you want to airdrop android users just buy an android mate
Discussion from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994854
The more tragic thing is that the US government really does not care about consumers in general - otherwise they would have ensured standards even for the big megacorporations to adhere to.
Nothing could support this more than eliminating the department that was setup to financially protect consumers.
We were staring.
People voted against it. Bigly.
I'll be happy when Airdrop works reliably on Apple equipment.
It can't reliably work between two adjacent rooms in my home without arm-waving.
A hundred or thousand mile trip through iCloud works tons better.
Yes same, you bump, you put iPhones on to op each other, you enable "findable by other". And still you may be messing around for minutes. Then a larger transfer starts... But fails half way for 6 times.
It's the best way (if it works!) to transfer full quality live images quickly, but otherwise I'd be happier just using Signal.
It depends on Bluetooth to establish the connection so if you are out of Bluetooth range it won't work.
can the EU pass a law forcing apple to make AirDrop work between two ios devices?
An additional benefit is that the Wi-Fi standard also means that the weird account requirements on Google's Nearby Share can be avoided by independent implementations (i.e. on Windows or Linux or maybe rooted Android, iOS and macOS already have it of course).
"Contacts only mode" will always be a challenge, but at least the "I just want to share a file without Google watching me" use case is now resolved by Google implementing a standard that doesn't involve them.
Unfortunately, this is Pixel 10 exclusive for now, for some reason. I expect Samsung to pick this up eventually as well, but I'm not sure if Google will be able to backport this tech through Google Play Services the way they did with Nearby Share on older phones.
Qualcomm has confirmed it's coming to Snapdragon phones soon[0], which maybe hints that it's dependent on the SoC drivers? Samsung uses a mix of Snapdragon and their own Exynos, but I can't see them not releasing it to their Snapdragon phones when others do, and then they pretty much have to release it to their Exynos phones too.
[0] https://www.notebookcheck.net/Qualcomm-confirms-Quick-Share-...
An implementation of AWDL on Linux requires a Wi-Fi card that supports "active monitor mode with frame injection". [1] I looked into using it with an Intel Wi-Fi card I had and it appeared mine wasn't supported. I'm guessing the situation is similar on Android in terms of SoC support.
[1]: https://github.com/seemoo-lab/owl?tab=readme-ov-file#require...
Have you confirmed that the new feature works without an account or is that speculation?
The account requirement for nearby share never made sense yet they still did it the way...
I've ditched AirDrop for LocalSend, which is universally cross-platform (iOS, macOS, Linux, Android) and works very well. It's not a complete substitute, it doesn't work in the case of completely casual sharing between devices that are not connected to a shared WiFi network, however.
I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action.
The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.
Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).
Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
Apple made major contributions to USB-C and adopted it a decade ago in their MacBooks. They were committed to lightning for 10 years starting in 2012-ish, so usb-c was likely inevitable in iOS devices.
However I would preferred a backwards compatibility lightning 2.0 upgrade. Cleaning a usb-c port is a huge pain and they are more prone to pocket lint clogging than lightning.
While I really like the convenience of not having multiple different cables to charge my devices when travelling, I agree with you on cleaning the usb-c port. In that respect, the lightning design was a lot more elegant and made more sense for a pocketable device.
Plastic dental picks work great for cleaning USB-C ports.
just don’t apply too much pressure or the center segment can bend over time, becoming weak and prone to potentially snapping off.
It happened to me at least.
Yeah you want to focus on the outside corners of the port and be gentle with the inside contacts.
Haven't encountered that yet. But I always try to be extra careful and also look for the thinnest ones I can find. Seems like a product niche right there. Rigid, thin, non-conductive picks.
iMessage escaped DMA because it has marginal market share anywhere outside the US. WhatsApp is the dominant messaging platform and is opening up:
https://developers.facebook.com/m/messaging-interoperability...
> The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing
It made all the iPhone docks/speakers/etc. obsolete. The last time that happened, when Apple swapped the old 30 pin connector for lightning, it pissed off a fair number of customers.
This time they could blame the EU which was likely a huge plus.
iPhone docks and speakers were already obsolete. They had a moment during the 30-pin era, but its been long since Bluetooth, Carplay took over in any mainstream use.
Careful on what you wish for. The same regulatory action can be (is) being used for Chat Control (that dropped off the main page for some reason). Ultimately neither power center acts for the general interest.
The iPad Pro got USB-C in 2018, well before the EU legislation. It seems inevitable the iPhone would have got it even without the EU getting involved.
The usb C to hdmi adapter is 100x less reliable than the lightning to hdmi adapter (having talked to many that used both).
Not sure why that is, but something to ponder.
You're a libertarian but regulatory intervention made everything about the market better and a better world for everyone involved with a relatively small change that was being stubbornly refused by a company for a small marginal benefit to themselves?
We call them "LINO"s.
Or... You know... We also like watching one giant corporation that benefits from distinctly authoritarian policies get wrecked by another authoritarian entity to the benefit of better competition in the market.
But apparently unless you're a suckup to the authoritarian entity that you like is now a LINO.
Bingo.
Left libertarianism is compatible with such views.
Basically, libertarian on social issues paired with a preference for a decentralized economy, as opposed to a "tankie" (Stalinist) style centrally planned economy.
What is “left libertarianism” supposed to look like? I find this concept baffling. The end result of libertarianism is nothing like what the left is supposed to support.
>What is “left libertarianism” supposed to look like? I find this concept baffling
Here you go:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-libertarianism
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Sure, because I think that, ultimately excessive regulation stifles innovation. I mean, heck, the EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR because they're worried that it's going to cause them to miss out on the AI boom.
My point was just that Apple is such an outrageously bad actor (and the USB-C and Airdrop rules so beneficial) that these rules were getting even a very pro-market person like me to at least be open to the idea of regulating some of these out-of-control giants.
Your last paragraph doesn't really make you come off as a libertarian at all. If Apple is truly a bad actor, then the libertarian response isn't to have the EU force them to use USB-C on iPhones, it's for people to move away from iPhones to other choices, which means Androids.
Libertarian ideals only work if there is more freedom of choice than we have here.
“Excessive regulation stifles innovation” is pretty much a tautology. The point of argument is what constitutes “excessive.” Libertarians generally consider almost any amount to be excessive. What you’re describing just sounds like being aware of tradeoffs, which should be true of anyone paying attention.
> EU is looking to effectively dismantle GDPR
The reason is lobby, not innovations.
From reading this comment it doesn’t sound like you’re a libertarian at all.
Next up please do streaming. Chromecast seems so locked down so take AirPlay and make it a standard.
Then instead of just opening up NFC, make Google and Apple Wallet support plugins, so users can have one interface with all their cards but not tied to one payment system.
This is false. Google just reverse-engineered it.
the real kick to the teeth for apple is when they will be forced to adopt different browser engines across all markets.
btw safari is a fine browser but on iOS it seems crippled a bit.
we are already getting there with support for web-gpu.
> If I had to guess why neither of Google’s Quick Share posts mentions Wi-Fi interoperability standards or the DMA, it may be because Google has been complaining about various aspects of the law and its enforcement since before it was even passed
This is telling a lot about US companies complaining about EU laws.
Imagine the worldly gains of allowing such an amazing technology to permeate society. Ah, well, that's against the interests of the shareholders. It's better to lock shit down and earn a dollar than precipitate betterment for human kind. The dollar! All hail!
Airdrop support is a really weak reason to switch to Android. Just sayin’
The DMA also forces them to have interoperable end-to-end encrypted group video call support in like 5 years or something insane. No idea how that's supposed to happen!
Telegram implemented such feature.
https://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end/group-calls
The problem isn't E2E encrypted group video calls. FaceTime supports that. The issue is interoperability with E2E encryption.
If Apple says sure, implement this FaceTime spec. Facebook does the same thing, go ahead and implement Messenger video chat.
Now you have the Android NewVideoChat app which supports its own protocol, Facebook's and Apple's. A user with NewVideoChat tries to invite a NewVideoChat user, an Apple user and a Facebook user to a video chat.
Except Facebook Messenger's app doesn't support Apple's Facetime app doesn't support Facebook Messenger, so you run into some issues. Something needs to dupe the stream out to all three services which use radically different payloads and encryption methods - and they have to do it without breaking end-to-end encryption. Do it at the client-side and the Android app users will need to dupe their own streams three times and at least one user will need to relay the other two other streams, with all the bandwidth and latency issues that entails. Do it on the server side and you somehow need to translate between protocols (and possibly codecs!) without decrypting them.
And if your video group chat supports private messaging between a subset of participants, you can end up in a situation where a Facebook user wants to send something to a Facetime user without the NewVideoChat user seeing it.. which is a bit of a problem.
Will this help or hinder the CCP’s strong arming of Apple to hinder airdrop?
[dupe]
Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994854
The better dupe (linked in TFA) - from March:
> Cross-Platform P2P Wi-Fi: How the EU Killed AWDL
https://www.ditto.com/blog/cross-platform-p2p-wi-fi-how-the-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43505022
[dupe] of your own comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062963
[dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45994854
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Is the eu or apple the toddler here?
So what is it? Comanagement between EU representatives and Apple employees? It looks like the German model where unions co-manage the companies.
On the paper it looks great, but the problem is the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens. It’s great for my Apple products, but I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
> Comanagement between EU representatives and Apple employees?
Whatever gave you this impression? That’s not what the story is saying at all.
> the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens
It is not supposed to. The EU is a group of states, not citizens. If you want your voice to really count, lobby your national government, which has more say in the councils of ministers or the council of Europe than the MEPs have.
> I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
How big is that "entire lavish class"? Just to know how upset I need to be. Also, which law was "written by lobbies"?
> the problem is the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens.
Yes, EU citizens probably absolutely love not being able to conveniently share files between Android and iOS.
> I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
What lobbies, in this particular case? Google? Samsung?
Look, I don't like some of the things the EU is doing and I think Apple should consider (along with other tech companies) selling products tailed to the EU, Asia and rest of the world. In the long-run, it might be cheaper.
That said, they are setting a good example of legislating for tech. We should be doing a lot of that here in the US. I don't need a bulletproof, ultra-secure, end-to-end encrypted, formally verified phone (although that would be nice). As a boring regular person, I want to not have to need all of that because my government will imprison people that violate my rights. But more on-topic, the FTC (EDIT: FCC) exists to regulate among other things, wireless comms, so this would be something they should be legislating.
Although, putting on my tech hat, I need to re-state that I disagree with this move. I want tech companies to experiment and use faster, more secure, more reliable comms tech without having to worry about compatibility. It is in my interest as a consumer.
Lightning was a superior technology to USB-C, we don't have it now because the EU forced apple's hands. I don't want to lose out on good tech. The EU should have instead forced everyone else to use lightning if they want things simpler.
Why is the EU intent on having inferior tech, inferior capability, inferior pay, inferior innovation-friendly environment. They have the power to demand better things and provide them for their people. The compromise isn't needed. At the risk of offending the HN crowd, I'll even say that the EU shouldn't support open-source things unless they are actually the superior tech. You can't eat or pay your bills with ideals. If commercial/properietary tech is better for europeans, that is what the EU should focus on.
I will drive European or Japanese cars that are better than American cars, I don't mind doing the same with tech, except with Europe that's getting more and more rare. What happened to Nokia and Ericsson. NL has ASML, wouldn't it be nice if we had a TSMC competitor in Europe as well? I don't want to keep going on, but I hope my point is clear.
Competition is good, Android shouldn't need to support AirDrop, it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.
Instead competition, the EU is wanting forced mediocrity. They are within their rights for sure, but it isn't the best thing to do.
I only wish they did the same thing with electrical outlets and forced the world to use one mediocre standard :)
> it should come up with a better alternative and leave iPhone users wondering why Android's solution is faster and works at greater distances. Same with iMessage compatibility.
Okay, so, why don't we see competition in places where it matters, like Airdrop, iMessage and the App Store?
The answer seems to be pretty simple, to me; Apple considers themselves above competition. It doesn't matter if a superior system exists, they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone. It's a lose/lose situation between consumers and the economy, who neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
We do see competition there, iMessage is superior, so many android apps try to emulate it. thunderbolt was around before USB 4, lightning was before USB-C, the Apple appstore is still a model of better quality/security. You can see google trying to emulate that and requiring devs to id themselves (competition isn't always pleasant). Why would you spend making something better, if it doesn't give your company a competitive edge? If you're forced to help your competition have the same capability, where is the ROI?
> Apple considers themselves above competition
In literally every market apple is in, they have intense competition!?
> they ultimately decide what is righteous and anyone who disagrees buys a different phone
Ugh.. yeah.. shouldn't they be allowed to sell things that they believe will sell well? I mean on one hand people complain about cheap devices engineered with planned obsolescence, and then you complain about what.. better quality? If they believe it is a superior system, then certain, I want that as a consumer. Why don't you? And I also thing being able to buy a different phone is great, that means no monopolies, that's what we all want right?
> neither get superior software solutions nor cheaper products.
I am getting a superior hardware and software for apple. What his happening now is, for no amount of money I could possibly earn can I get a good quality product, I have to settle with EU's forced mediocrity even though I don't live in the EU. People who can't afford apple products have alternatives, but that isn't enough for you, you want everyone to get participation trophies? that's what it sounds like, i could be wrong, it sounds like you don't want to feel envious of people who get superior products? Even though there are many android phones more expensive than iPhones, so it isn't even a question of affordability. it's just forced mediocrity. With no upsides to anyone other than people who feel great about "america bad" "middle finger to apple".
Problem is, what you're describing is not competition. Apple is not exposed to any commercial threat, their products like iMessage, Safari and the App Store are artificially segregated from free-market pressures. Nothing can dethrone them, period. The only way to create a true competitor to these apps is to receive Apple's private entitlements. If you cannot understand that, you won't be able to interpret anyone's antitrust allegations against Apple.
Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love. I don't care if you think Apple's brand appeal is diminished by prosecuting their anticompetitive zeal. That's not my problem. You will have to "settle" for it anywhere iPhones are sold, because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Apple is already dethroned, the only market they're doing well at is the US. And even then Android phones are still the majority, apple just tends to make a lot more money in the US. I can't think of a single product where apple is the leader of the market share, but by all means correct me if I'm wrong.
Whatsapp, Signal, Viber, etc.. they're all threats to iMessage. These apps even make themselves the default SMS handler so that the only thing iMessage is good for is native iMessage messages. It isn't distributed outside of Apple ecosystem either unlike its competition, Apple is doing the opposite of dominating the market there.
How is Safari segregated? Most Mac users (including me) install Firefox or Chrome typically. Are you saying Apple doesn't face competition, or are you saying Apple doesn't compete enough (which I don't see how that's a fault?)
I don't think the appstore is particularly more competitive than android's.
The appstore is the only area where there might be legitimate antitrust allegations. Even then, I'm with apple there because it is in the interest of their consumers. You already have the bland and mediocre android, don't ruin apple for the rest of us. Monopoly is exactly what you're advocating for, monopoly of the mediocre and bland. There is absolutley no service or product apple makes where there aren't enough alternatives, or where apple has created an anti-competitive dependency.
> Apple giving equal footing to competitors changes nothing about the products you love
Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple did it the opposite way, because they make products that last and are durable! with lightning the wear and tear impacts the cable (male) end the most, so it's a matter of replacing cables. with USB-C, the device end needs repair and replacement. Now i'm stuck with your bland mediocre thing. Why am i paying the price for android users' envy?? Same with app store, I don't want b.s. crap android apps, i used android long enough and i hated it, i don't poor quality crap.
Why don't you get that freedom means everyone gets an option, everyone gets to do what they want without harming others. Apple users love apple products. Even when you tell us how android phones have better specs, better hardware, more up to date, we still like apple precisely because of Apple's business practcies that improve the user experience for us. And now you want it to be just like android, why? You have the choice to use android already, why do you need to take away my freedom to use the kind of products apple creates?
I want an extremely closed and gated app store. I want background checks on app developers, forget just ID'ing them. I want it to be a costly endeavor to write iOS apps. I liked lightning, I love iMessage, I recommend it over Signal. I used signal and I have lost a LOT due to it's backup/recovery mess, I've suffered a lot under crappy android apps. airdrop works prefectly, I don't want someone with a buggy/malwared android phone sending airdrops to me, I don't want shoddy android messaging clients sending me imessage messages. Apple is doing what we as its users want. You the majority android users are taking away the choice of the minority apple users.
> because when you buy an iPhone you don't get to choose things like your charging cable. Unfortunately, we haven't seen a mass wave of iPhone defectors after they ruined the thing with USB-C.
Of course not, but you were hoping for a mass defection. Apple still makes superior products and we get that it is crappy EU law making that is forcing this. What would I defect to if I didn't like USB-C? You took away the one choice I had. Every android device uses USB-C. Your entire platform here is taking away people's choices and freedoms.
You're not helping anyone get on an equal footing, because by your own admission, they were unequal before right? All you've done is take away the choice of apple's users. Did android messages gain anything with iMessage compatiblity? Did android phones gain anything by apple using usb-c? Do android phones benefit from apple allowing more app stores? No, the only people that benefit are crappy developers that spread their mediocrity everywhere. No apple competitor is gaining a competitive advantage by these measures.
There have always been third party lightning cable makers, I can't think of any major app that isn't available on the app store. Consumers aren't complaining about this. I'll concede that having to store both lightning and usb-c is annoying, but hey.. don't buy apple and avoid USB-C!!?? You literally don't have to use apple products. If product design was considered freedom of speech (is it?) you'd be coercing speech and banning speech you disagree with because it annoys you.
This is weaponized enshittification!
> Yes it does. Give me back my lightning charger. Now I have USB-C where male port is on the phone and the connector is exposed to wear and tear. Apple
I have one of every Apple device category except the HomePod. But this is a horrible take. I can now use my same USB C cables everywhere.
But more importantly, I can use standard USB C peripherals from network adapters USB C external monitors, standard USB C to HDMI cords, plug a USB C storage device in etc
No, I get there are a lot of people like you, but you did have the choice of just using android didn't you? Governments are not ways to enforce your personal preference or force it on others. Apple felt their lightning tech was better, isn't having better tech and an environment where different ideas can be explored better? EU is already anti-innovation, you don't succeed with startups easily there, it's precisely because of this sort of close minded unimaginative thinking.
I don't care if apple required manually splicing wires to charge your phones (safely), how is it the government's right to force them to not do that? The whole point of having a free society is small things like this. I keep posting long posts on HN, so let me cut it short and say that lots of freedoms can be taken away in the name of convenience to others. Companies should be punished for monopolistic practices, but they shouldn't be punished for imagining alternative ways of doing things and succeeding with that. I've had android phones where the USB connector on the phone end broke or degraded, you can hopefully see my perspective as well? How can we have a free society like this if we can't even resolve and tolerate very small differences of opinion like this?
The lightning tech wasn’t better, it could only do USB 2 speeds - yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Even before the EU mandate lightning was showing its age and they started replacing it with USB C on the iPads.
You’ve had cheap Android phones if you had that problem. Have you heard reports of that being a problem with iPhones?
As far as compatibility, I carry around an external USB C powered external monitor for my laptop. It gets power and video from one cord on a computer.
I can take that same monitor and that same USB C cord and plug it up to my iPhone.
This is me sitting at a Delta lounge watching either Breaking Bad or Better Caul Saul with my phone connected to my second monitor
https://imgur.com/a/SC6WDri
The iPhone by itself can only power it to 50% brightness. But there you see if I plug in a battery to the second USB C port, it can power the monitor at full brightness and charge my phone.
USB C is better in every way.
> yes I know there was one iPad that could do USB 3 with one special dongle - and it couldn’t even do video out well with the dongle. The video adapter had hardware to decompress a compressed video stream and convert it.
Those are two separate things.
These iPad models had USB 3.0 over lightning. Lighting however was designed to solve the 30 pin connector "alt mode" problem. USB-C recreated the "alt mode" problem.
In the original 30-pin iPod, iPhone and iPad days, you had multiple video out adapters to support RCA, VGA, composite, and so on. These were also _different_ with the different i-device models - the adapters were not backward compatible, so when they came out with a new higher-resolution model of dongle, it wouldn't work on older devices. Conversely, the complexity of supporting various hardware mappings onto the 30 pin connector meant that older dongles could get deprecated from new devices.
There weren't a lot of people who invested in video output for their I-devices, but for those who did this was a very frustrating issue.
So for lightning, they went to serial protocols. So rather than negotiate a hardware mode where certain pins acted like HDMI pins in a pass-through mode, they streamed a H.264 video to the dongle - the dongle then rendered it and used its own HDMI output support.
Since this was software negotiation, a newer dongle could support new video formats and higher resolutions while still supporting older devices. There were also examples of improvements pushed to more complicated dongles like the HDMI adapter via software updates. But fundamentally, the complexity of supporting a broad hardware accessory ecosystem wasn't pushed into the physical port - it could evolve over time via more complex software rather than via increasingly complicated hardware in every phone.
With USB-C we are back to guessing whether the connector is expecting the phone to support HDMI alt mode, DisplayPort alt mode, MHL alt mode, or to output a proprietary system like DisplayLink data.
USB 3.0 (which is what these iPads supported) never had these alt modes. It was USB-C which became a connector for (optionally) supporting a lot of other, non-USB protocols. The lack of USB-C support is why these iPads only supported video out with the lightning to HDMI adapter.
USB-C is decent, but it suffers quite a bit from there not being strong certification. This is partly why Thunderbolt 5 has shifted to becoming a compatibility- and capability- oriented certification mark. You know for example that thunderbolt 5 video will always work, because the cables have all the data pins and the devices are going to support DisplayPort alt mode.
> the FTC exists to regulate among other things, wireless comms
FCC purview?
oops, I meant FCC, edited it.