Apple May Sell Optional iPhone 15 Pro USB-C Thunderbolt Cable

Thanks EU for this absolutely dumb mess you made.

Standardising ports and cables is not dumb, my phone is the only reason I still need to carry a Lightning cable, everything else already uses USB-C.

However, restricting USB-C to USB 2.0 speeds unless you buy a $130 cable, is the very definition of dumb (and greed.)

Surely the WHOLE POINT of implementing USB-C is to NOT need proprietry cables any more? Why can't we use a high quality third party USB-C cable to transfer data at resaonable speeds? I imagine the EU, who pushed for USB-C in the first place, will see this as yet more gatekeeping

Thunderbolt ≠ USB. They’re two separate protocols and have different requirements in the cable to function, but just the same connector, USB-C.

Having one cable rule them all was never a real possibility. There are 19 wires required inside that one cable for a full USB4 functionality. You think all manufacturers wanna put that much in there with the proper shielding and metals (and a separate chip for Thunderbolt) for safely transferring 40Gbps with room for zero error?

The solution to your problem to your problem is to buy the best, most recent, top of the line cable for all of your needs, aka one that supports Thunderbolt and USB4. But in that case you’re gonna be spending like ~$100 per cable, rather than the $5 you can find on Amazon.

That’s what’s happening here. Apple is not gonna bundle a Thunderbolt cable with an iPhone. They want to keep the margins they got when they removed the charger.

The other solution is for either Thunderbolt or USB4 to win the battle and reign supreme, which is a lot easier now than back in the day since they’re nearing feature parity now. But even then there’s no guarantee USB5 or USB6 would be on the horizon with even more expensive requirements.

Not to mention Power Delivery is its own specification aside from USB-C and its cables.

When articles like this speculate that the non-pro iPhones will use USB-C with USB 2.0 data transfer speeds, that just means they don’t want or expect people to be sending data through a cable anymore at all. They want as few wires in the cable as possible to save money. I don’t even know why data transfer through from a phone cable is even still a part of anyone’s process anymore. WiFi/airdrop are all good and fast enough at this point.

Anyway, USB-C solving all our port issues is an illusion. You’re always gonna have to pay attention to what kind of cable you’re buying and what most recent standard it supports. Manufacturers be cheap. 40Gbps+ speeds (USB 3.0 and the first USB-C cables started out at 5Gbps, remember) require more and better quality materials.

Sorry to unload this all out on you, I actually really just needed to write this out for myself lol. It’s confusing stuff.

Yeahhh!!!.. Can't wait to buy $129 cable....

Thanks EU for this absolutely dumb mess you made.

Blaming everyone for the mess except the corporation who actually incited the E.U. to create the new regulations, which is also the corporation that creates the mess and gets to profit greatly from it.

?

Surely the WHOLE POINT of implementing USB-C is to NOT need proprietry cables any more? Why can't we use a high quality third party USB-C cable to transfer data at reasonable speeds?

There’s nothing in the article that implies the cables will be proprietary. But different cables support different wattages and different transfer speeds. You need to pick the right cable to fit the intended application. There isn’t just a single type of USB-C cable.

Surely the WHOLE POINT of implementing USB-C is to NOT need proprietry cables any more? Why can't we use a high quality third party USB-C cable to transfer data at reasonable speeds? I imagine the EU, who pushed for USB-C in the first place, will see this as yet more gatekeeping

How is this gatekeeping? The cable is literally just a regular TB4 / USB4 40Gbps cable, nothing proprietary.