macOS 13 Ventura review(arstechnica.com) |
macOS 13 Ventura review(arstechnica.com) |
It seems wrong to me in an age of excessive e-waste that seemingly arbitrary thresholds is set that has zero hardware links.
I generally really like Apple, and is planning on retiring my 2014 Macbook Pro for an M2, but it's still working absolutely great. But i could only upgrade to Monterey with the legacy patcher like many others, seemingly problem free.
It's the same thing with older iPads, i wanted to use one as a "hub" for homekit, but you can't because it can't update ios beyond 9 (regular browsing + video + 99% of apps is also broken), so people just throw it in the dumpster with a great battery, a fine screen and a processor that could easily be used as a server, video player, browser etc.
I know other companies are often worse but we really need legislation around this; something ala if the biggest players drop support for some hardware let the user upgrade anyway even if performance will be worse, otherwise release all drivers so that you can at least install linux or alternatively release some "trimmed down versions" of the OS for legacy systems that can still run basic functionality.
Yes, I get that this machine is 7 years old, but I cannot tell from using it, everything is extremely fast, I upspecced it when I bought it and maxed out a lot of things, it has a decent i7 processor, 32gb of ram and 1tb ssd and the m395x maxed out graphics card, heck it still games well in Windows.
I really see zero reason to upgrade, it runs better than my new work windows laptop except that Apple have decided for some reason I can't get the update.
They've basically just ended 20 years of Mac for me.
Pity.
But please don't throw your iPad in the dumpster! I don't know why you're saying it could be easily used as a video or browser -- it still can! Tons of people use old iPads running old versions of iOS specifically as video players. They're perfect for that! Don't put it in the dumpster, sell it on eBay or give it to a friend's kid or something.
You can't play video on it because Youtube/Netflix/Hbo + all other video apps don't work anymore on IOS9.
You can't browse the web because certificates don't work anymore in the browser.
I don't know why you guys are attacking me for proposing legislation and retiring my old iPad - i'm a techy with a 2014 macbook pro that has really tried finding a usecase for his my old 2. gen iPad lol, i use stuff for as long as possible.
Most regular non tech people won't be able to stretch their laptops life as long as i did, that's the problem.
Why would it have to go in the dumpster if it still works well? This reasoning is why we have exessive e-waste, not the lack of upgrades...
ie, the processor is just fine for doing all of the above, but slowly all functionality has been lost.
The security footprint of machines running Ventura using OpenCore Legacy Patcher is going to be much smaller than that of machines officially updated, too.
I don't recommend my friends or family put important information or sign in to any device that is running unmaintained OS software
Because I assume they're exploitable from a security point of view after that point
Of course no one follows that advice but what are we supposed to do?
How do regular OS patches work with OpenCore Legacy Patcher? Do you have to go hoops to update OS for security / feature updates once you set it up?
The last thing we need is some crappy poorly written law that is filled with a bunch of unrelated hanger-on pork projects to appease politicians into voting for it.
Apart from selling more hardware, which is their one and only goal ?
This is probably better stated as two goals: lower costs, higher sales (profit = sales - costs). Dropping support increases the costs line in effect as it's a consumer happiness. But it also decreases it by reducing the support cost (multiple logic paths to support / more code / more bugs etc.)
I expect the more modern Apple Silicon based ARM devices to have a longer support lifespan than older Macs.
1. Apple has been doing this for years and years. At this point, it shouldn't be a surprise.
2. It reduces legacy cruft. The alternative is you get to keep 20-30 year old legacy cruft, as with Windows. I'm not saying what Microsoft does is necessarily bad, just different.
3. The Intel laptops don't stop running[a] -- and if history is any indication, will still receive critical security patches.
4. At least the bonus here is that the lowest end Apple Silicon Mac almost entirely crushes the high end i9 MBP 16" it replaced -- for a fraction of the cost.
a. Unless it gets hit by one of a number of known quality issues (screen, keyboard, battery, etc).
Actually there isn’t an x86 version of the current macOS; it’s a single operating system that runs on multiple processor architectures. During the PowerPC to Intel transition back in the day, I could boot a PowerPC or Intel Mac from the same hard drive.
The same is true today with Intel and ARM-based Macs.
I have a 2017 Intel iMac running macOS Ventura but there’s plenty of ARM code on it. Here’s the output from running the file command on ls:
/bin/ls: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures: [x86_64:Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 [arm64e:Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e]
/bin/ls (for architecture x86_64): Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64
/bin/ls (for architecture arm64e): Mach-O 64-bit executable arm64e
I suspect these machines will be supported for the foreseeable future.
BTW, my 2017 iMac is running its 7th major operating system:
- macOS 10.12 Sierra
- macOS 10.13 High Sierra
- macOS 10.14 Mojave
- macOS 10.15 Catalina
- macOS 11 Big Sur
- macOS 13 Monterey
- macOS 14 Ventura
I think Apple will support Intel Macs for a good while. They’re not going to get all of the same features as ARM-based Macs (due to these machines having Apple’s custom silicon the Intel Macs don’t have) but they will get the same core features for the foreseeable future.
They are still supporting Intel chips from the Haswell generation and later, although as plorkyeran points out, they can now assume AVX2 chip instructions are available, which simplifies things for them.
We're talking about the company that makes AirPods and forces Lightning Cables to exist. Half their product line is e-waste.
Also all Ruby gems with native extensions stopped working for me, even the pre-installed system ones.
My current workaround is to use my 2013 Mac Pro that's stuck on Monterey to do so, but eventually that's going to kick the can...
To add an insult to injury, the Monterey era trick still works. Change the file extension from .eps or .ps to .ai (Adobe Illustrator) and QuickLook will happily display the file. It will even offer you to "Open in Preview" which then fails.
The new System Settings app is kind of buggy, which makes me think that 13.1 is coming sooner (by the end of the year?) rather than later.
Other than that, there isn't much I can personally say about Ventura. It's more or less what one would expect from mac OS as of late - a subtle continuation of Big Sur and Monterey. Aside from the hardware compatibility list, there is nothing disruptive about it, which I am sure many will like.
For better or for worse, it seems like 80% of the software engineering effort at Apple goes towards iOS.
Does anyone know what functionality has been lost in the transition? I was hunting around for it after I upgraded myself, but it's so different it's hard to compare. Ars' mapping indicates things are mostly still there. But I also can't seem to reorganize my connection priority list for WiFi networks. I wonder if the PM in control of the WiFi network settings panel even knows that feature exists.
Settings has some issues but isn't as bad as I was led to believe from the pre-release hand-wringing.
The only compatibility issue I've encountered is that `man --path` no longer works. Weird.
I'm sure it's just me. I'm the only one struggling to understand why "Desktop & Screen Saver" is so far from "Displays" and whether what I'm looking for is in one of those or maybe "Dock & Menu Bar."
It could be that the new System Settings won't resolve my lack of memory when it comes to this one particular area of MacOS, but I can't imagine it getting worse. I use search for most things now as it is.
How does this new feature perform with external monitors? One of my gripes with macOS is how awful it's at managing windows. For example except for Slack, Outlook, Zoom, and a Brave window for listening to music on YouTube that stay in the MB's display, all the other apps go into my external monitor. However every time the computer goes to sleep, I must move a bunch of windows back to the external monitor. I was using Stay [1] and it was doing a decent job, however I couldn't justify paying $15 after the trial ended.
Yeah, I get the argument that you shouldn’t have to spend more money to deal with an annoyance and the OS should be better at this… but if you have a solution, is there still a problem? (Or it you don't want to spend $15, was it really a major problem?)
I spent money on a tool that helps manage my menu bar for a similar reason, and it has made it much nicer to use my Mac.
Meanwhile, Linus is only just starting the discussion to drop the 486 from the Linux kernel.
I would think that would be separate - the keyboard re-mappings are different for each keyboard that you plug in.
I use a normal wheely mouse and am fine with "natural" scrolling, but I may just be weird in that respect. (I've had really bad luck with bluetooth mice, so my not so magic mice live in my closet.)
That's what killed the "Apple's UX is great and it just works" myth for me after i got my first work issued MBP. Not only is a basic feature lacking, there is stupidly confusing configuration for it in two places that makes you think it exists, but it doesn't. Apple's UI/UX/PM people make stupid decisions, same as any other company.
It’s about the fact that in macOS it’s the content that scrolls, not the viewport. By moving your finger up on a touchpad you’re pushing the content up, and the wheel of a non-Apple mouse is a physical proxy of the content.
You may not like the decision, but in my opinion it makes a lot of sense, and I set the mouse to work like this even in Linux.
It's nice to have the option for that, isn't it? Instead of having two toggles in two separate menus change the same setting who knows why.
>Orange color scheme is fittingly Halloween-y for late October
Lol what? Are we to the point now where OS updates are so mundane that a highlight of the release is that the primary color scheme is "holiday relevant" for at most two weeks out of the year?
Not bashing Ventura - I haven't used it - I just feel like this is a weird thing to put in the "pro" column for a review of an operating system. Not that putting it in the "con" column would be any less weird...
It's not a bullet point meant to be taken seriously as a "pro" of Ventura... let's just have some fun here!
I commented the other day that though all my recent Apple products have excellent color space they are all out of calibration. I decided to TRY calibrating my iPad Pro 11 (first gen) during Sidecar. The results were... not good. ~91% sRGB and ~71% DCI-P3. It's noticeably desaturated compared to running native. Likely some USB compression; I'm wondering if they got around that by implementing the "reference" link via Thunderbolt, or just created a specific pairing and are doing something akin to FRC in the compression. I'd be interested to know, but likely they aren't going to tell us.
Before, when I'd press FN to change my keyboard language, I used to see "French Canada" and "English Canada". Now I just see "Canada" and "Canada - CSA".
This is a weird change.
Of course, I cant just delete the languages I dont want to, that would be too easy (and all google guides "helpfully" said: just delete the extra language, bro).
So after some refistry magic I was able to bend the system agaist its will to work as it always did, but of course it changed back several times since then on its own.
How does one manage to fuck up something as simple as "remember those two languages I use and switch between them when I press this" is beyond me. At this point im more inclined to believe in purposeful malice than such brutal incomptence
User: not really
This. macOS is now a second class citizen in Apple’s ecosystem. If it weren’t, simple and basic features that users actually want would be implemented long ago, such as a window management so that we don’t need to install Tiles/Magnet/…
Also, stage manager is a UI/UX nightmare, I will stick to Rectangle app.
Are keybind-heavy users a dying breed? It blows my mind that Apple would wise up to returning SD Card / HDMI ports to the Macbook, only to follow that up with increasingly taking away my ability to navigate my computer with just keybinds.
I'm preaching to the choir on HN, but I think just about every piece of software aimed at creative/technical professionals (Blender/Adobe CC/Maya/Autodesk/Vim/Ableton/etc) is packed to the brim with keybinds because it allows you to do things fast.
Oh well, I guess I'll be sticking with my ^+▲, ⌘+TAB, Spotlight/Alfred, and all the binds I get from the Magnet app[1].
Thankfully, I uninstalled and reinstalled and everything seems fine now.
I realize that these old drivers won't work forever and that it's kind of a miracle that they still work! I assume that the code is intel running in rosetta.
I only have one question: who was in charge of the thumbs up / thumbs down on this new design? Was it Craig Federighi?
You all did amazing work with the tools offered - SwiftUI makes the side bar navigation and simple cell table views the easiest to iterate and create - and you all achieved that. Someone should have stepped up though and waited till next OS release for a change like this (with the new SwiftUI layouts, etc) - or potentially not touched it -
or explain in depth why a side bar makes sense for settings, the most cognitively demanding part of an OS now with superfluous information on the side? That's critical real estate to lose, then doubly hurtful with visual clutter / something were expected to ignore.
System Preferences can hide individual preference panes from the list. System Settings can't.
System Preferences search field is focused on launch. System Settings is not.
System Preferences is fully keyboard navigable. System Settings is not.
System Preferences uses tabs where System Settings in many cases uses a modal window hidden behind a button.
The list goes on and on...
You’ll love finding out that in System Settings, the Screensaver section doesn’t let you enable/disable the Screensaver. Or adjust how long until it activates. For that you gotta go to “Lock Screen”, yay.
Here’s hoping they improve it over time, I guess.
I get that everything in System Preferences is in a place that makes sense, and once I've found it, I can reason back from there to why it's there. But... is a screensaver software or hardware? I mean, it runs on the screen, which is hardware, but it's obviously software--but then, this is a computer, so everything is software. I mean, Date & Time is under hardware, which... is not where I would have looked first. Siri is triggered by a physical button, but is software, while Data & Time are visible on my screen but is hardware--presumably because of the clock inside the computer, right? What about the chip enabling Siri?
Anyway, other people didn't like the version of Pages I loved, and maybe other people don't have trouble with System Preferences. Different strokes, and all that. I just don't get the complaining as if something of value was lost.
System Settings might be even worse that System Preferences. Fine. One of Apple's worst things has gotten worse, and is now an area of focus, so now might, or presumably will get better. I prefer that to the neglect System Preferences was receiving.
What are you talking about?
First of all, there's zero "critical real estate" to lose. Settings doesn't, and never has, taken up even close to full screen width on any regular laptop/monitor. And it still doesn't. Literally nothing is lost.
Second, why doesn't it make sense? The previous icon palette was a usability disaster. I'd spend 15 seconds hunting for which damned icon I was looking for each time. The sidebar has much more logical groupings. Plus, when you follow a button/link in one panel that leads to a different panel (e.g. accessibility to keyboard, or vice-versa) it's clear visually where you are now, because a new category in the sidebar is highlighted.
And I just have no idea what visual clutter you're talking about either. Do you find tab bars at the top of a dialog to also be clutter? Do you find the menu bar to be clutter? Because this works the same as both of those.
I attribute System Preference's failure to be not creating additional icons and groupings that were properly descriptive and respectful of user use - for example: Gatekeeper should have been its own icon, not buried inside of Privacy and Security, then under a separate tab. From my experience, it was the primary feature to access within preferences. Further, yes, many improvements should have been made to Preferences, no doubt - Settings doesn't seem it though.
Settings doesn't make sense because the sidebar assumes a 'full screen / most of screen at golden aspect ratios' paradigm for the active window - which is absolutely not true for System Settings on Mac. More clearly: the sidebar works well when your mind can 'group' the edge of the bar, with the edge of the device. This works wonderfully for iPad - your mind can 'section off' without much mental effort. It's how excel usually works too - what madman would use excel at the aspect ratio of System Settings?
You now have a vertical and horizontal visual plane to mentally track - that also doesn't align in it's own window (what is Search, AppleID Profile Pic, etc doing anchoring the layout at top left) - and now all the controls are basically outlined table cells with weird choices for the controls. Try going to Desktop & Dock and identify what exactly are the groupings for the tables for 'Dock'? now I have to figure that out, too?
Sidenote: I wonder if we'll one day see government enforcement of software akin to the physical spaces governed by the ADA.
I should think large tech companies would be happy to advocate for such regulation, because it creates another (small) barrier to entry for competitors
Stage manager definitely gives me that vibes. Apple trying very hard to make the UX feel same in a laptop and iPad.
[1] https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=ipad+2nd+gene...
> Is there any legit reason Apple is hastening the drop of support for older computers when they can be upgraded just fine with the OpenCore Legacy Patcher?
I gave multiple reasons.
* Camera didn't work.
* Sound coming out from built-in speakers was flat.
* Broadcom Wi-Fi didn't work out of the box.
Didn't spot any other issues during tests.
I've never been able to find what I needed quickly in the old UI, always felt disorganized and random. I like the one on the iPad a lot better, I find it way easier to navigate, so I'm happy for the change.
So yes, it functioned poorly, while also looking terrible by today's standards.
The App Store only sends versions you can actually run.
A Mac on the latest OS that it can run can still expect at least two to three years of additional security updates, so if yesterday was the end of the line for your Mac and you want to use it for a couple of more years, feel free. You won’t get Stage Manager, but from the reviews I’ve read, you’re not missing much.
My iPad mini 2 from 2013 just got a security patch a few weeks ago even though it's stuck on iOS 12.
There is a market for nicer-feeling Chromebooks, so ChromeOS Flex is a partial remedy for e-waste.
I spent nearly 25 years in print publishing tech (up until 2015) and it was rare for the last 3 years of my tenure in that industry to see any postscript source files for anything. The industry that postscript was built for moved on nearly 10 years ago.
eg
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-1084...
Does the removal of PS also remove support for EPS? That would be very awful.
I wouldn't take that as any kind of promise it's gonna be maintained by them for an acceptable amount of time.
Up until last month when they announced the new Apple Watch SE, their entry-level watch was the Series 3 which you could still purchase even though it didn't get updated to watchOS 9. Sometimes they just continue to offer a product because some people might still buy it.
But it’s one thing to sell a $249 watch that won’t get the latest operating system update versus a $6000 Mac Pro. Those customers would be super unhappy if the next operating system doesn’t run on it.
And why would you have to mentally put the sidebar together with the left side of the screen? Do you complain about tabbed dialogs not having the tabs align with the top of your physical screen?
When you have more "tabs" than can fit horizontally (e.g. more than 5-7), the best solution is to turn them into a vertical list on the side where you can see and scroll more of them comfortably. This is better. (Whereas icon-based "table of contents" that disappears when you navigate and requires a "back button", as System Preferences was, is just terrible all around.)
You know all the way back in System 6, Control Panel used a left sidebar, and the overall window was a little more than half as wide as a Mac SE's screen. It's a pretty classic layout.
The new System Settings is totally clear on how to use, and totally reasonably sized. No unreasonable "mental effort" needed. Sure you can nitpick the precise organization of a few panels but for the many hundreds of settings, nothing will ever leave you perfectly happy.
Focused Panes of action to me in a desktop environment is correct for the context. Trackpad and MagicMouse environments to me are primary click/twitch, not 'tap thing under glass' based UIs. Click/twitch means back like UIs are easily accessed, while 'tap thing under glass' means vertical scrolls and the like are easier.
System Settings are made as if the cursor doesn't exist on the Mac, which is plain wrong. Just look at the iCloud pane: it has so much wasted real estate to the table cell space from title to toggle switch, why?? God forbid you actually just click the 'Contact' cell itself, nope! you must click the smaller toggle switch all the way to the right!! And this is after you just swiped down to see the rest of the page. Oh yeah, and the whole consistent paradigm of swipe-to-edge to go back -- nah, that doesn't exist either [0].
You could fit n-times the number of settings if you removed the left bar and the horrible tableview style for settings. If you're familiar, these should be collection views with as many large icon settings just like Finder's icon view, where a click on the icon or the label will toggle the preference for iCould.
I guess too I'm just looking for consistency from all of Apple's software. These interactions should all be standard subclasses to the whole organization
[0] Safari's swipe to go back should be made available to notes, settings, etc
It's about clarity, affordance, organization, and not getting lost. And also, yes, consistency as you say -- this has become more consistent with iOS settings, which is a good thing.
(I also don't know what "click/twitch" means. Googling it gives me zero results that aren't for Twitch streaming. But in any case, the navigate/back paradigm has nothing whatsoever to do with which input device you use. Neither mice, trackpads, nor touchscreens have any kind of consistent "back button". Sometimes there's some side button or side swipe that works with some programs, sometimes there isn't.)
I have a side business, and a few weeks ago I decided to do a pop-up and needed a device to take payments on. I pulled out my older ipad, reset it, and decided to create a new apple account for my business. But, because this was a new apple account and the ipad was still running iOS 12, I was unable to download anything useful from the App Store. I had to find a new device, reset it, log in with my new account, download the latest version of the Apps I needed, reset it again, and relog in with my personal account. THEN, on my ipad, I was able to download the latest compatible versions of those apps.
I went through all that, only to open the Shopify App and immediately be told I had to update to the latest version, which of course, my ipad didn't support. So, yeah, I have this hardware that still works great, but for all practical purposes is e-waste.
I would love to be able to put Linux on this and use it for some hobby projects.
I'm sure that will be considered the app developer's fault, because -they- are expected to handle backwards compatibility, since Apple won't.
What you chose to describe as "legacy cruft" is actually the luxury laptop people spent over $2K close 6 or 7 years ago.
> The alternative is you get to keep 20-30 year old legacy cruft, as with Windows.
It's not a choice between bricking perfectly good computers after 6 years or maintaining them for 30 years.
And heck, Windows 11 doesn't really support pre-Coffee Lake CPUs without hacks similar to OpenCore's.
During the past 3 years I was forced to upgrade from Mojave to Big Sur to Monterrey, each and every single time because otherwise my 2019 MacBook pro would not be allowed in the network as it was running unsupported OSes.
No, they do not keep running with the last supported version. Having a successful boot sequence and seeing blinking lights is not the end goal of spending over $2k on a luxury computer.
Yeah, click/twitch is a made up term just now. Though I would say an affordance of the input device one uses does dictate what is 'easiest‘ or 'most natural' to use - a quick swipe once the edge of a window is reached, to signal either refresh (for pull down) or go back / forward for horizontal edges sure feels nice on a trackpad. I believe had Apple had a slide swipe via edge earlier in its life - we would have gone straight to glass only devices, no home button.
I can understand that they didn't want to have customers upset that a dodgy third party cable fried their expensive Apple equipment, but the transition to USB-C can't come soon enough IMHO.
This meme that Apple loves to create bags and bags of arbitrary proprietary cables needs to just die. It's 100% FUD.
I'm saying that USB-C is better, and has been the better option for quite some time.
Conversion to USB-C will cause me to throw away all my cables.
Maybe for you, Lightning cables don't seem like such a bad investment. To me, it's an source of imminent E-waste. The Lightning port on my Magic Trackpad 2 is the only thing that makes it feel dated, and unfortunately the feature that will eventually make it unusable. There is literally zero reason this accessory should have shipped with the port.
The new one is not perfect. For example, the on/off switches are ugly and the layout is far from great, and I like “preferences” better than “settings”, which makes more sense for an appliance than for something you adapt to your liking. But the old one was very much not “not broken”.
It’s not like lightning is some obscure connection: there’s a good distribution of stuff out there using either Lightning, USB-C or even microUSB and this is still better than the mix of connector types that used to be more prevalent. USB-C is fine, but there’s nothing to evangelize and it’s not going to decrease the amount of cables in use at any given time, nor stave off cable replacements. It might reduce the amount of cables you travel with by 1, maybe.
> but there’s nothing to evangelize and it’s not going to decrease the amount of cables in use at any given time, nor stave off cable replacements
That's the point of having a universal connector, though. The USB-C standard can be modified in the same way Thunderbolt can, and if Apple wants to upgrade/change USB-C then they can do it the same way they did in 2014. There are other parties involved in the development of hardware ecosystems though, so bringing Apple to-point is the only recourse we have for fixing the situation. If Apple doesn't like that, they should have shown more initiative upgrading their USB2.0-based serial connector.
In terms of the quantity of devices shipped and still in use since Apple introduced it on the iPhone 5? This is flatly false; and it’s not just iPhones but also: iPods, iPads, AirPods, Magic Mice, Keyboards, and Trackpads. Apple moves massive amounts of product, and their biggest sellers tend to be supported for longer than their direct competitors.
Lightning is proprietary, but it isn’t obscure.
> For everyone who isn't Apple, USB-C is a direct upgrade. That's just a fact of modern manufacturing, not a subjective opinion from an Apple pariah.
Correct. My last (and only two) Android phones went from microUSB to USB-C. The USB-C connector was more durable, but I also learned the hard way that you can’t just pickup a USB-C cable and expect USB 3.1 or greater transfer rates. The first extra cable I bought back when there only maybe three options at most was a USB 2.0 cable with a Type-C connector.
My travel USB-C cables also held up less well than my travel Lightning cables.
> That's the point of having a universal connector, though.
More accurately, this is the hope. Time will tell us if it is a false hope or if the hope has been realized. Personally I’m hoping when Apple makes the jump, they also up the transfer rates. It’s not that Apple couldn’t make a lightning connector that supported > USB 2.0 transfer rates, but they only chose to do so for one product release ever (the original iPad Pro).
I think people are pinning a lot of hopes on USB-C and: microUSB to USB-C, it was warranted. Type-A to Type-C, it was warranted. I don’t think it makes a damn bit of difference going Lightning to Type-C. Maybe some fringe situational benefits, but I’m not convinced Type-C is the final standard we will see; nor will it “solve” cable waste.
> I also learned the hard way that you can’t just pickup a USB-C cable and expect USB 3.1 or greater transfer rates.
Apple designed the Thunderbolt spec with their own two hands to ensure this isn't an issue. Increasing the upper bounds of transfer speed won't ruin the iPhone experience any more than it ruined the Macbook experience.
> More accurately, this is the hope.
The hope is that the world's largest companies would treat their consumers with a modicum of respect instead of telling me to buy my mom an iPhone or to buy another e-waste cable for an accessory I can barely justify using. Apple has always been on the forefront of technical adoption - their refusal to abandon Lightning is product negligence, plain and simple. It's so obvious that European legislators can see it without even being told the technical benefits. We're out of hope, our only recourse is literally taking Apple to court and fining them obscene amounts of money until they listen. This has started in Europe (where consumer protection is strong) but eventually America will start raising their eyebrows too. The defense for Apple's market position becomes weaker every day.
And as someone with a few things around that still take microUSB: that is by far the worst thing about those products. I also know that if I had bought those same products 5 years earlier than I had, each one of them would take a different cable standard from each other and none of it would be compatible with anything else in my house. So the worst thing here is an inconvenience now that was a solid upgrade at the time.
> It only becomes infuriating when you realize that Apple's omission of USB-C is entirely arbitrary and not held up by technical limitation.
By the time Type-C was a realistic consideration, Apple had already sold large quantities of Lightning connectors in their products to a customer base that was still complaining about the transition from the 30-pin Dock connector. Not immediately rushing to replace Lightning when there were still large numbers of products using 30-pin in-use was a good business decision, not an arbitrary one.
> Apple designed the Thunderbolt spec with their own two hands to ensure this isn't an issue.
Apple and Intel collaborated. Don’t give them too much credit. Also: Type-C != Thunderbolt != USB.
> Apple has always been on the forefront of technical adoption - their refusal to abandon Lightning is product negligence, plain and simple.
There’s a lot of things I can point to at Apple under Tim Cook’s tenure and call “product negligence”. This isn’t one of them. I think the negligent part is in not upgrading the transfer rates at some point in the last 10 years, but not immediately abandoning Lightning for Type-C isn’t one of them, and the e-waste concerns are way overblown. People will buy as many cables as they think they need. If you can swap cables around from other products, that’s actually pretty great, but it’s a fringe benefit because if you’re maintaining a ratio of cables to devices anyway, the most likely outcome isn’t that there will be fewer cables manufactured and thrown away, but that there will be more cables of a particular variety manufactured and thrown away. You might save on one or two cables, but the moment the ratio of devices that need a charge to cables tips too high, you’re just going to buy another cable. Which cable? Whichever one you need for whatever you want to use it for, but if its primary purpose is to deliver electricity and not bits (the most common application for even data cables), the shape of the connector is basically just a detail because the other end is probably going to be Type-C or Type-A USB, chosen based on what bricks you have available or are willing to purchase.
My only hope with an upcoming iPhone connector transition is that we’ll see transfer rates of at least 5 Gbps, and I dare not hope for more lest I be disappointed.