this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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And people still buy Apple products?

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[–] narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 7 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Robaque@feddit.it 1 points 52 minutes ago* (last edited 46 minutes ago)

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.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 32 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

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?

[–] sanzky@beehaw.org 12 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

they are mixing gigabits with gigabytes so that is confusing. but even then, the math is still wrong for the usb 2 speeds.

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

My best guess is they somehow mixed up minutes and seconds? Usually people mix up bits and bytes the other way and overestimate speeds.

[–] mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

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…

[–] BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 points 2 minutes ago

Data communication speeds have always been in bits/second. No marketing teams involved, it’s just the most logical way.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 13 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I mean I don’t think I’ve ever seen USB 2 actually hit the 480mbps theoretical speeds, usually it’s much slower

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] Zanz@lemmy.ml 6 points 14 hours ago

Those are the bi directional bandwidth not the file transfer speeds going one way.

[–] HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 19 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 12 hours ago

presumably a liability thing, don't want to be nuked for slander

[–] drspod@lemmy.ml 40 points 18 hours ago (4 children)

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.

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 17 hours ago

Only off by a few orders of 10^x.

Typical shit journalism can't be bothered to look at the units on their calculator.

[–] ArsonButCute@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 14 hours ago

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.

[–] Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 16 hours ago

Sounds like the writer confused Mbps with MB/s or something.
But even then it's kinda weird.

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[–] B0rax@feddit.org 69 points 23 hours ago

Pro models have USB 3 or 4 Non pro iOS devices have USB2

Not confusing… but I guess this is enough for an article

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 51 points 23 hours ago (32 children)

People discuss this as if they connected their phones to their computers more than once in the past 5 years.

[–] Bunbury@feddit.nl 4 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] LandedGentry@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

ProRes =/= raw. ProRes is apple’s proprietary lossless video codec. They shoot raw photos. AFAIK Apple has not made a raw codec, that’s mostly the purview of canon, black magic, red, etc

[–] Bunbury@feddit.nl 1 points 2 hours ago

Alright, fair. Noted. Just because their marketing calls it ProRes RAW doesn’t mean it is true RAW. I didn’t look into it that much.

What I do know though and what my point was about is that it makes big files fast. Files of a type and scale you can’t effectively do anything useful with on an iPhone itself. So if you want to edit them (and why else would you shoot in that format?) then step 1 is that you want them off the phone and on a platform that can deal with them. And for that transfer speed matters.

[–] misk@sopuli.xyz 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago)

If you make money on YouTube you can afford iPhone Pro probably. You probably already have one for shooting quality video because what else is there at this budget?

[–] Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 17 hours ago

Lemmy users can't fathom that average users aren't really bothered by it.

[–] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 14 hours ago

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, …

[–] LostXOR@fedia.io 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] remon@ani.social 62 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 30p87@feddit.org 22 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Not old vs new phones. Anything not Pro is 2.0.

[–] dan@upvote.au 27 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

480Mbps ought to be enough for anybody.

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[–] daskye@fedia.io 17 points 22 hours ago

Thank God I abandoned Apple a long time ago

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