For Apple, I believe these to be the same. Don't get me wrong, I also understand and know that being able to have that control in other areas is a reason that chip in the lightning cable exists too. And I'm not here to defend those reasons. But I'll take and applaud the reasons that do improve situations for people working in the supply chain of the products I purchase.

Look, I know it's easy to hate on Apple and just lump them into a pile of bad companies for many people. And the tech crowd in particular seems to like to latch onto that negativity and let it become part of their personality. Just please put aside that cynical nature every once in a while.

I'm not encouraged by the words of Apple under Tim Cook, instead I'm encouraged by their actual actions in many areas.

Looks like you are now good to go as well, even on a new 6s. Pretty quick turnaround time for a major new version.

First, I think it's silly to proclaim that anything in technology is going to last a decade. We haven't even had the iPhone for a decade. Mini USB didn't last a decade. Micro USB is seeing its end in USB C about 8 years in. The 30-pin lasted that long, but honestly, should it have? Nobody is going to shout "but you said ten years!" And if they do, that'll be nothing new for any move Apple makes.

And yes, Apple is pretty great at changing their minds. From the iPod with video to the iPad Pro stylus, they change their minds all the time.

The question is whether the moves are good for the consumer. No matter which way you slice it, it's extremely odd to commit so much with USB C on the MacBook and then not put it in a single product released since. How great would it have been to put USB C in the new iMac, and charge your MacBook with a single cable to the back of your desktop?

Basically, I'm willing to accept your reasoning for why they're sticking with thunderbolt on the iPhone, but there's something odd about what they're doing here, and I don't think there's a good explanation for it.

Personally, I'd love to see USB C on every device from every company. Thunderbolt isn't going to be that standard, so lets abandon it ASAP.

Yes. Long living standards help minimize confusion, product waste, allow more products to be created in the ecosystem, and many other benefits. That's why it's worth putting in the time and investment into something that can last that long.

Seeing USB fumble around with connectors/plugs for years is not helping the U(niversal) part of the name. It's not even as simple as going from normal to micro, to mini. Mini had some odd variants, USB Go complicated plugs, and micro ended up needing to be reworked with USB 3. None of these designs showed much forward thinking beyond what was done for USB 1.0.

HDMI in my mind has done a little better here. And it's improved home theater setups as a result, since Firewire never really took off in this area as intended.



Ugh, the stylus thing (and this is directed at both sides as I've seen Apple fans trash the Samsung Note over this). This isn't a case of Apple changing their minds. Jobs take was that styluses should not be the mandatory way to operate a touch screen. The iPad Pro, and Samsung Note stylus are optional additional input methods. Much as a physical keyboard is an optional accessory to the iPad. The products still work fine with finger input. The products that came before like the Newton, Palm Pilot, and Pocket PC devices had mandatory styluses for touchscreen input.



I agree that use case would be nice. And in time it will come. Though I'm not surprised USB C hasn't spread into the rest of the product line yet. The Macbook is a forward thinking computer they put on sale now. Just the same way the Macbook Air was rolled out. Apple essentially does these one off products to help figure out how to standardize the tech at a lower cost in the rest of the line. This is a common strategy with vehicles. The MacBook Air in particular was important for Apple due to the unibody construction method now standard across the line.


I agree with wanting to see USB C spread far and wide. I don't agree that Thunderbolt should go away though. Again, Thunderbolt 3 uses USB C connectors. Any computer with TB3 will have USB C plugs with USB 3.1 compatibility. Along with adding faster speeds for further PCIe growth, and faster DisplayPort for powering higher resolution monitors. Audio producers in particular don't want to lose the latency advantage PCIe still offers over USB 3. Apple is waiting on Intel at this point to release TB3 in chipsets they use in their products.

Fair enough on all points.

I still think it's an odd move though, and I don't think the comparison to the MacBook Air is quite the same situation.

Anandtech wrote a nice article on USB-C back in June:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9331/intel-announces-thunderbolt-3

Intel's vision: we'd have USB-C rolling out by end of 2015 and with more volume in 2016. That seems to be what's happening.

Of course, this means that we'll have three variants on USB-C-to-USB-C cables: "charging cables" (i.e., USB 2.0 only), "data cables" (i.e., 10Gbps) and "active cables" (much more money, supporting 4K video, etc.). And from my initial dive into Amazon, we already see a huge absence of standardized labeling. You pick up a random cable, you'll have no idea what's inside. Sigh.

Still, it's impressive to imagine a world where every single port on your computer is USB-C (plus perhaps a mini-phono jack), including the power connector. It's also pretty wild to think through the security ramifications. You buy a cheap 120V wall wart for charging your laptop and... what's really going on inside that wall wart? There will need to be active electronics to support all the different charging standards. Could you hack a charger to hack your phone? Oh boy.

Aw man, you had to go and ruin my perfect standardized port utopia, didn't you?

I had forgotten about this part. Shows how much power Intel has lost with USB, though overall I see this as a good thing.

One thing that always bothered me with the design of USB 1 and 2 was it's dependance on the CPU on the host side. This was somewhat a power play by Intel to try and preserve their hold on the PC market at a time they feared PCs switching away from x86. It took until USB 3 for the protocol to offer device to device communications without involving a host CPU, and to bring over the latency benefits that can bring to time sensitive uses. (Audio and video production being one of the markets wanting low latency).

If USB-C cannot tolerate a 'charging only' cable with literally NO data link, just power, then the security issue may become huge.

I can foresee special prophylactic cable end adapters, sold by trusted names, that allow you to access charging power from untrusted (data-wise) sources. Or device manufacturers (Apple, et al) having to create a USB 'firewall' within the device to prevent unwanted attacks.

The Bad-USB attack vector may become a bigger, more difficult risk if every thing with a USB-C connector MUST have electronics inside.

Benchmarks from the iPad Pro are impressive. The A9x in it has a near equal single core CPU benchmark to my 2.6 GHz Core i7 processor from 2012, which needs a fan and much more power to achieve the same computing power. It's a dual core though compared to quad core of the i7. The iPad Air 2 with it's A8x is a bit odd in the lineup having the only tri core CPU.

Reviews of the drawing tablet use case seem to all indicate a better experience then the Wacom Cintiq devices. I'll be curious to see how much of the creative industry moves over. Cintiq was becoming the standard at my more recent game jobs over the screen-less drawing tablets.