They were thinking about optimizing them.
#USB PHONES FOR MAC MAC#
If Lightning is so great, why didn't Apple use it on the Mac as well?įor a very brief period of time, both the Mac and the iPod had FireWire connectors and everything was in perfect balance, as all things should be.īut then the iPod went Dock, and Apple never bolted a 30-pin connector onto the Mac, and so ended the brief, beautiful era of one plug to rule them all.īy the time Lightning came along, Apple really wasn't thinking about unifying connectors, like at all. And no court in the world would convict them. So, if you even asked mainstream customers to go through yet another transition and buy yet another set of new adapters, especially ones as potentially problematic as USB-C was at the time, they'd cut you. While Apple could control Lightning cables and accessories to the point where any customer could be relatively certain anything they bought would work, the initial USB-C rollout was a nightmare by comparison, with confusing and poor-quality cables flooding the market to the point that the entire internet suckled themselves to the Amazon reviews of a lone Google engineer, who bought and tested every one of them, bless his nerdy heart, because for way too long a time, it was the only way of knowing what was safe to buy and what might just burn it all down. The biggest advantage USB-C offered back then - being a standard - was also a disadvantage. I mean, Lightning offered a ton of advantages over the 30-pin Dock, including sure, being smaller, but also being pure digital, so Apple wouldn't have to to constantly hack the pins anymore, and being symmetrical, so you didn't have to try and plug it in, fail, flip it over, fail again, flip it over again, and then maybe succeed. So, the idea of making another connector transition just 3 years later, with the iPhone 6s in the fall of 2015, was just a non-starter. Let me know in the comments if you remember it! And, to make matters worse, Apple completely failed to have adapters and cables available at launch, forcing not just early adopters but a lot of regular people doing regular upgrades to wait days and weeks before they could even plug back into their existing chargers and their audio systems at home, work, or in the car. Many of whom had already bought a bunch of Dock cables and accessories over the years that suddenly didn't fit their new phones. When Apple moved the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch to Lightning in the fall 2012, almost a decade later, it was much, much more painful for far, far more people. Apple moved the iPod from FireWire to Dock in April of 2003 but it was such a nascent industry back then that only the early adopters were really affected. Then why didn't Apple switch to USB-C when it was ready?Ĭonnector transitions are a big deal.
The spec for USB-C, by contrast, wasn't even finalized until August of 2014, almost two years later, and the first USB-C device, Apple's own 12-inch MacBook, wasn't even announced until March of 2015, two and a half years after Lightning shipped on the iPhone.īasically forever in the age of gadgets. A name that neatly paired against the Thunderbolt protocol they'd been working on with Intel for the Mac.īy September 2012, Lightning was ready to ship. So, Apple took many of the same principles as USB-C, made the actual plug a little smaller by putting the pins on the outside instead of the inside, and came up with Lightning. And Apple decided they just couldn't wait. Now, their technology team was already working with Intel and others on what would become USB-C, but because it was going to be an open standard, it was going to take a long time to finalize. Back around 2010, Apple was planning the iPhone 5 and it was going to be so thin that the then-current connector, the good old-fashioned 30-pin Dock, would no longer fit inside.
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