this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Lightning is a worse cable because it is proprietary.
How many times have you encountered the problem of wanting to charge your phone at a friends place, and they don't have your device specific cable?
In the last decade, I only encountered that with Apple devices.
I have only once encountered that problem. I don’t usually charge stuff outside home/work/car.
If I did, I’d keep my own cable because even before the advent of malicious cables people often had messed up stuff that only worked half the time.
Think “hey can I borrow that guitar cable?” “Sure!” “What the hell, this things buzzing all over the place!” “Oh, you gotta loop it around the strap peg and it doesn’t work with angled jacks.”
The idea of proprietary hardware nowadays is interesting. It used to be, especially in industrial and commercial uses, that proprietary meant you had to have something that could only be bought from one place and wasn’t publicly documented. An interface for a rohm drive for example. Those weird one-off parts and dongles were expensive and not well understood, so they definitely fit the definition and spirit of being proprietary.
It’s a little disingenuous to me to call a cable you can buy at any gas station for five bucks “proprietary”. Especially when searching “lightning pinout” gets immediate results.
Is it technically proprietary? Maybe. Is it proprietary in practice? Not in the slightest.