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Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose)
(www.pocket-lint.com)
this post was submitted on 05 May 2025
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Technology
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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.
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.
If I didnt use SMB at home and Immich to transfer pictures from my phone I would be very mad.
On my vacation I transfered videos from my action cam to my phone for cloud backup (no laptop with me).
It would be very inconvenient to have only USB2 speed available.
I rarely take 128GB worth of photos at once so background iCloud sync is fast enough so that when I take a photo on my phone it’s visible on my Mac a minute or so after that.
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.
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.
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.
You may have glossed over the part where I said this is not premium hardware. Even bargain basement Android phones come with USB3. They've gone out of their way to ensure their less expensive (but still very expensive) devices have bad hardware.
Going by number of features isn’t really a way to tell what’s premium. For me the bar is set really low which is not having ads, which most budget Android phones fail at.
We are not going by "number of features", we're "going by" one specific feature.
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
4TB?
Maybe more like 6 times that (for me) :D
You have 24TB storage in your laptop? How?
By mounting it from my NAS :)
Well, that's cheating! In that case I have like 120TB.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
At least we both can hoard as much as we want.
sure, wirelessly.
Like media share to home server?
I use ghost commander to backup to the NAS. No wires.
Oh i see. How's the transfer speed?
I get 6mB /s or so, but it copies in the background. I also use it to copy media to my phone.
Yeah I could see this work if not in a rush.
I can’t on iphone
Wow really? Thats sad.
Yeah, there is a great app for photos though, photosync
Thanks for the info!
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.
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.
More than 6GB per minute in 4K? Because that already seemed like a lot.
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?
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, …
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.