Comment on Apple's USB-C transition is a confusing mess (and that might be on purpose)
narc0tic_bird@lemm.ee 4 days ago
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.
Robaque@feddit.it 3 days ago
Worth noting however that Apple have already made file transfer from iphones to anything outside their ecosystem a pain:
iphone to usb 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 with 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.
Slower transfer speeds is just the cherry on top.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 3 days ago
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.
Robaque@feddit.it 2 days ago
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.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 days 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.