USB-C connectors are usually rated for 10k cycles. Do you have any evidence that lighting connectors are rated for more cycles than that?
> The female port of a USB-C connector has a relatively fragile center blade. Lightning's layout was the opposite which makes it more robust and easier to clean.
This is very weak a priori arguing. I could just as well argue that USB-C has the center blade shielded instead of exposed and so is more durable.
Unless you have some empirical evidence on this I don't see a strong argument for better durability from either connector.
The unshielded Lightning center blade is on a $5 connector. If it breaks, I'm out $5 and it's reasonable to have spares.
The shielded USB-C center blade is part of an expensive device. If it breaks....
This speculation is just as weak without any evidence.
And for what it's worth, damage to the center blade does seem to be a common failure mode for USB-C and mini-usb connectors. Less frequent for something like HDMI but it does seem to happen from time to time. Lightning never felt like it locked in as securely as USB connectors do, but at the same time, every time I saw a damaged lightning connector it was always on the male (and therefore usually cheaper accessory) side.
Now, admittedly, "being yanked by a robot vacuum and falling on the ground" is outside the design parameters for a port; but I absolutely had USB-C ports fail in a way that Lightning would have not.
(Not the person you're replying to, but also a "Lightning was a better physical connector than USB-C" weirdo.)
It might be an issue with the USB-C port used in these laptops since the ports on MacBooks feel less wobbly to me. But in the end this is just speculation and anecdotal.
So Apple had to use pretty strong springs, resulting in a lot of friction on the pins. That made them easier to damage, so they had to switch from gold to a crazy super-resistant rhodium-based alloy for contact coating.
There's always outliers, of course, but I had this issue with USB Micro-B on at least one other device and never saw it with a Lightning connector.
What do you guys all do with your devices?!?
Fortunately MagSafe works fine!
A small amount of lint gets into the hole. You pack it in when you plug in the cable. Repeat a thousand times and now you have a stiff “plug” of lint that prevents the connector from fully entering your device.
To be fair, Lightning ports were prone to being clogged with lint, but that was fixable in twenty seconds with a safety pin.
USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.
Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.
> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.
This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.
> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.
That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.
> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.
That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.
Are you sure it's the center tongue which takes all the stress, and not the round shell?
AFAIK, USB-C is designed so that the cable breaks before the port, because the parts which wear the most with use (the contact and retention springs) are in the cable, not on the device.
