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Pro models have USB 3 or 4 Non pro iOS devices have USB2
Not confusing… but I guess this is enough for an article
Take any usb-c charger, plug it in and it will charge. We just covered 90% of use cases.
Beyond that:
old phone: slow data transfer.
new phone: faster data transfer but still slower then computer.
So very confusing.
Not old vs new phones. Anything not Pro is 2.0.
480Mbps ought to be enough for anybody.
Except for <list all usecases that emerged since 2015 or so>
I'm just joking - it was a reference to the famous Bill Gates quote (that he didn't actually say) about 640k of RAM being enough.
People discuss this as if they connected their phones to their computers more than once in the past 5 years.
Lemmy users can't fathom that average users aren't really bothered by it.
Ppl dont back up to local hd?
They let iCloud do the thing. Their computers don’t have that much storage.
I backup to my computer. It actually has more storage than iCloud and I don’t trust any cloud with my private data.
I’m sure we’ll find much evidence for hobbyists on Lemmy having different use cases from the general public but Apple wasn’t ever interested in supporting that niche at budget prices because there’s little money to be made there.
Regular person doesn’t need much offline storage because they download apps from the App Store, listen to music from a streaming service and sync photos to iCloud or Google Photos. Those people probably shouldn’t store their data offline either way because they won’t back it up properly. It’s another case of Apple treating general public like incompetent grannies but they’re kind of right about that.
Apple wasn’t ever interested in supporting that niche at budget prices because there’s little money to be made there.
Not true. Difference in cost between USB 2&3 is negligible. They've just done this to create artificial value for the "Pro" models. Same way they create artificial value with ram and storage.
They've just done this to create artificial value for the "Pro" models.
Correct. They found out professionals have money to afford premium hardware and software so you can charge them that. Perfectly reasonable way to make money, little competition in that space as opposed to general purpose budget stuff.
I back mine up to my own cloud. Wirelessly 😅
Meanwhile me sitting with 4tb on my laptop and 5gb on icloud because fuck paying for cloud storage
I copy photos and videos off my phone all the time; it's far more convenient than trying to send it over the internet. But even the "slow" speed of 480Mbps that they're complaining about seems more than adequate; copying a few gigs of photos will only take a minute or two, and even copying my phone's entire 128GB of storage would only take 35 minutes. Compared to most USB storage devices that's blazingly fast.
Wired screen mirroring would be a nice use case. E.g. just plug the iphone in a USB dock and watch a movie or join a meeting.
This works already on Pro and non pro models.
Thank you. It appears that even the USB-2.0 models support video output.
Yeah. I did it exactly once, on vacation, while I didn’t have internet connection/didn’t want to waste the rest of my data, and wanted to import photos to my MacBook to edit them. It was fast enough on the Lightning connector.
This is a complete non-issue especially since faster hardware would probably be more expensive. Apple has enough actual issues that are more important such as repairs, RAM pricing, sideloading, …
There is at least 1 use case for it: some of the newer iPhones can shoot raw format video. Apple calls this ProRes. It is also possible to take those videos as large as 4K. This comes out to about 6GB per minute of video taken.
Imagine someone like a YouTuber decided to take a couple of 20-30 minute clips. Yeah, I wouldn’t want to wait for wireless transfer on that. Especially not if that is a regular thing someone does.
Only Pro models support reasonable speeds for USB-C, up to 10Gbps. Regular iPhones are capped at USB 2.0 rates, up to 480Mbps, which is no faster than Lightning. With an iPhone 16 Pro, a 1GB file transfer can take 8 seconds -- with a vanilla iPhone 16, you're going to be waiting over 16 minutes.
10Gbps is about 20x more than 480Mbs but 8secs times 20 is 160secs which is a lot less than 16minutes so what is going on with this calculation?
With an iPhone 16 Pro, a 1GB file transfer can take 8 seconds
1GB / 10Gbps = 1GB / 1.25GBps = 0.8secs
with a vanilla iPhone 16, you're going to be waiting over 16 minutes.
1GB / 480Mbps = 1GB / 0.48Gbps = 1GB / 0.06GBps = 16.67secs
Wow what a great article, well done.
Only off by a few orders of 10^x.
Typical shit journalism can't be bothered to look at the units on their calculator.
I usually don't like to dogpile onto authors but I went to look at their article history (at least at this outlet) and they look to be almost Invariably Click-bait and or AI Trash.
Sounds like the writer confused Mbps with MB/s or something.
But even then it's kinda weird.
Thanks for showing the math
Only Pro models support reasonable speeds for USB-C, up to 10Gbps. Regular iPhones are capped at USB 2.0 rates, up to 480Mbps, which is no faster than Lightning. With an iPhone 16 Pro, a 1GB file transfer can take 8 seconds -- with a vanilla iPhone 16, you're going to be waiting over 16 minutes.
...What? At 10Gbps a 1GB transfer takes under a second, while at 480Mbps it would take about 17 sec. Was this article written by AI or did the author just not care to actually do the math?
they are mixing gigabits with gigabytes so that is confusing. but even then, the math is still wrong for the usb 2 speeds.
My best guess is they somehow mixed up minutes and seconds? Usually people mix up bits and bytes the other way and overestimate speeds.
Yeah, that’s largely due to hardware manufacturers’ and ISPs’ marketing teams wanting to show bigger numbers. “1 Gbps” sounds a lot cooler than “0.125 GBps”. But file sizes are almost always measured in bytes, not bits. And the difference between Gb and GB is subtle, at best. So a layman will easily assume that 1Gbps will transfer a 1GB file in 1 second.
And don’t even get me started on the difference between GB and fucking GiB…
I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen USB 2 actually hit the 480mbps theoretical speeds, usually it’s much slower
The maximum real world speed for USB 2 is around 320Mbps or 40MB/s, but that only happens if there is only one device connected to the USB controller. 30MB/s is much more typical.
Those are the bi directional bandwidth not the file transfer speeds going one way.
99 % of smartphone users don't care about USB-C transfer speeds because they only use the port for charging. Maybe a fraction of these users uses wired CarPlay, which works the same with USB 2.0 speeds. Maybe some users use a USB-C to headphone jack adapter which works the same as well.
There's a tiny fraction of users that'll ever notice the speed difference (because they use the port for actual data transfer) but they won't find reading a spec sheet confusing.
Worth noting however that Apple have already made file transfer from iphones to anything outside their ecosystem a pain:
iphone to external drive on a mac is a nightmare. Can't use the photos app, so you gotta use image capture which is laggy as hell and you either can "select all" or else you have to scroll through and select manually if you just want to transfer the latest photos.
For iphone to linux, granted, whoever's using linux will likely be more familiar with the command line, but libimobiledevice and ifuse are anything but intuitive for the non-tech-savvy.
As for windows, Apple still wants you to use the apple-approved way but iirc I have, inconsistently, been able to get into the DCIM folder.
But even then once you do get into DCIM, the internal folder structure is absurd. Albums are just an illusion, all you get is a bunch of "###APPLE" folders containing around 1000 photos each, and to top it off you also gotta deal with the heic format. And if you wanted to access anything that isn't photos or videos, good luck. On linux I've more albums than DCIM have showed up but they mostly just seemed to contain metadata files. I get that the user isn't "supposed" to deal with this folder, but with the apple ecosystem so closed off and unfriendly to anything not-apple-approved, there isn't really an alternative.
Slower transfer speeds is just the cherry on top.
Adding to the phrase "might be..." is almost like trying to give them the benefit of the doubt while the have a bloody knife in their hands actively stabbing someone else. This in 1000% on purpose.
iPhones and iPads may be trash but macOS is still certified UNIX and the Apple silicon M1-M4 are honestly game changers in PC CPU design.
I would never buy an iPhone or an iPad.
I would definitely, on the other hand, pay some good money for a high end mac. I just simply don't have that kind of money to throw around. But if I did, I would.
Hardware wise I really like the macbooks, but MacOS is certified trash. So many traps and hooks if you want to leave the golden path Apple has laid out for you
Ey, it's not that bad. I've been using it for over a decade, never made an Apple account (so no appstore apps) and I never use any of the built-in apps (except for super basic stuff like the calculator or preview).
Still beats windows.
Still beats windows.
No argument there
Agreed
Thank God I abandoned Apple a long time ago
And people still buy Apple products?
Of course they do. They blame the EU for forcing Apple to go with Usb c, because Apple had no time to adapt to it