this post was submitted on 05 May 2025

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Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose) (www.pocket-lint.com)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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And people still buy Apple products?

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

iphone to external drive on a mac is a nightmare.

Yes, it should be better. But you know how you mass-produce a product at a competitive price (though premium) and sell a shitload of them? By optimizing for the average user. They should be awesome in every area. But when you choose what you focus on, it's not the tiny number of users with niche needs. This is similar to arguing that they should have higher than 10Gbps transfer speeds. It's not useful for enough people to justify the cost. And software is a cost, just as is hardware. Source: worked in software.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Sure, I don't doubt that cost cutting factors into apple's decision making, but it really feels like they went out of their way to make the internal file system intentionally awkward. I'm not particularly inclined to just chalk it up to cost cutting when it adds up to quite a pattern of controlling users' access to their own data, which plays right into their infamously closed ecosystem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I'm a unix nerd. They built their OS on unix. It's not unix anymore, but I don't think they're intentionally making it difficult. I had more trouble going from unix/linux to windows understanding where files were.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Libel if it's in print, slander if you say it in person

[–] [email protected] 42 points 3 weeks 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?

[–] [email protected] 21 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks 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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks 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…

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 3 weeks 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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks 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.

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