iPhone 15's USB-C Port Remains Limited to Lightning Speeds

I think there are logical explanations for this as commented by others. I’m genuinely curious who’s actually transferring data from the phone port these days… it’s been years since I synced anything to my computer. My port is used solely for charging. What’s the use case? Music?

I don’t know that there’s a lot of overlap between apple users and people that mind overpaying.

But paying for overpriced device storage then?

You’re equating monthly cloud storage payments to paying 40$ per TB of external HDD storage?

For reference, 200GB of iCloud storage are 3$/month, so 36$ per year.

Check prices before you make comments like this.

I work in IT and will often plug in devices to a PC for a variety of reasons (I work with alot of older folks, so “cloud storage” is scary).

The transfer times with iPhone can be pretty appalling.

It’s worth noting that wireless transfer does not mean “cloud storage”. It can, and often does, but it is also easy to wirelessly back up things like photos entirely locally. With most prebuilt NAS units, all you have to do is buy something like a synology, some of them even come prefilled with hard drives, and go through the wizard in the app. That’s it, and the app will wirelessly, automatically back up things like pictures to your own locally controlled storage. I’m pretty sure you can do it natively with Time Machine too if you really wanted.

(I work with alot of older folks, so “cloud storage” is scary).

Yeah, well, Jennifer Lawrence has a lot to say about Apple’s cloud storage.

I don’t want to pay for 300gb of overpriced iCloud storage. That’s the use case.

Are you syncing all of your data off of the phone via the cable and not wifi?

Setting up a network file share or FTP server or whatever and the app to access it is muuuch more effort than just plugging my phone in and using it like any other flash storage device, plus USB3 transfer speeds are better.

For me it’s just simpler and less prone to error is all.

Anyone using the pro to take raw images or 4k video. The files are huge.

That one actually supports 3.0 10 GB/s though.

It’s funny how Apple said that 3.0 was really fast and exciting.

Come on apple, it’s just 3.0. The first android phone with 3.0 (I assume 5 GB/s) came out a decade ago.

Moving large FLAC files onto my phone, and sending music data through USB into an audiophile DAC/amp. The higher the transfer speeds the better when you’re moving gigabytes of data from my computer to my phone.

Photos and videos for professionals. These days phone cameras are good enough for at least a backup device and they’ll transfer to laptop using cable. But I’d assume those people are on the iPhone pro models

I do it all the time to pull pictures off my camera to my phone. I can picture other photographers doing the same.

For me it’s because I use my old phones as webcams.

Only using the cable to sync with my Windows virtual machine with iTunes.

Wouldn’t have it any other way as iCloud isn’t for me.

Music and photos really. But they’re not common and you can do that on USB 2 speeds. For me I just take it as an opportunity to slow charge my phone. And I do it so rarely anyway, usually when I’m changing to a new phone.

Even when I sync to a computer, which is never these days, it’d typically just be over wifi.

Is this because it’s a last minute design change of just the port, but they opted to also change out the USB controller on the pros?

Or is this their new “16gb vs 128gb” upsell strategy?

Based on the presentation it seems like the USB3 controller is on-die for the A17 pro bionic chip. So rather than re-engineer the chip for the A16 they’ve shipped it on the cheap, they could add an external controller or re-engineer the die.

I’d bet next year all iphone models are USB3.

People will hate it, but it’s a very logical explanation

Maybe I’m lost but why will people hate it?

Yeah it appears like they are differentiating the high end phones with the latest SoC and giving the core phones the previous year’s chip. You get whatever the old chip had and next year’s iPhone 16 will get the A17 and all the features that includes.

Except several (non M1 iPads) have USB 3.1 already….

I’d have to see a teardown, but I’d imagine with all the extra space in the iPads, they could stick a separate controller board in there. Phones are a bit harder to do that with, especially if it’s a last minute change.

It’s their, use iCloud for data transfer instead of usb strategy

All that sweet, sweet data

WiFi is basically dialup compared to USB 3.1 speeds.

Man I tried wifi syncing for quite a while and had nothing but problems with it. It was a disaster.

It’s to force people to pay for iCloud storage rather than keep files locally on their PC. That, and nothing else. No other phone in this price range still has USB 2.0, and most haven’t for a very long time.

I don’t know any Apple users who actually use the cable. iCloud is effortless.

I don’t think it’s so much to force people to pay for storage insomuch as only people shooting 4k 60 long videos or people with very poor internet actually plug in to transfer data.

I would hate plugging my phone into my computer even if it were instant.

Typical dumb iPhone user

They may have had a contract for a certain number of chips for lightning and they’re using them in the lower iPhones instead of taking a loss.

The old chips are on a larger node and cheaper to make. They are reserving the expensive chips for the expensive phone to save margin.

They also may simply not have had enough supply of chips for the newer iPhones

That too. But likely just engineered premium.

Progression for we (Android), not for thee (iOS).

The first USB-C Android phones were also only USB 2.0.

Although that was 8 years ago, when USB 3 was only just starting to become commonplace.

You just have to pay a little bit extra to get the speeds (that no one really uses on phones)

Well I don’t have an original quality cloud backup. So eventually I move the DCIM folder back to my PC.

That being said. I haven’t tried “Nearby” to move a 30GB folder with hundreds of items to the PC. Maybe that works fine already. (For a few items it’s very fast as long as you have a fast WiFi network).

You can set up backup on PC(or Mac of course) over WiFi. It will then backup your phone overnight where speed is irrelevant.

I have syncthing setup to sync DCIM folder to PC over WiFi

I’ll transfer a bunch of audio books to and from my phone every once in a while. Since they are FLAC files I certainly do appreciate the additional speed from having a protocol that’s not yet old enough to drink.

And in case someone missed the reference: USB 2.0 was released in the year 2000.

😄do you really believe that there are more than 1 percent of iPhone users who sync stuff like you do? (Which don’t use a iPhone pro anyway)

I just upgraded to a 13 from my XR with a dying battery, and while I’m glad overall that Apple has adopted USB-C, I’m glad it started at the 15 so I don’t have to buy a bunch of new cables and bricks. I have 5 cables- 1 in the house as a data cable, 2 in the house as charge cables, 1 in the car and 1 at work. Some of them are longer than others. I don’t want to have to repurchase all of that.

But if you already are part of the USB-C ecosystem, absolutely. That said- this speed limiting thing is bullshit.

Just in case anyone has the wrong idea: it’s not artificial limiting, it’s the max 2.0 speed

To be fair, usb3 has been around since 2008. Surely apple could have afforded to pay 3 more cents per phone to support that.

Yes, I’m just saying that it’s not really an artificial limitation just corporate greed

It was just announced so, in the background its up to normal speed.

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iPhone 15's USB-C Port Remains Limited to Lightning Speeds(www.macrumors.com)

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