For This Year's iPhone, Apple Is Ditching Lightning Connector and Home Button, But Embracing USB Type-C and Curved Display (wsj.com)

Apple has decided to adopt a flexible display for at least one model of the new iPhone, reports WSJ. From the report: People with direct knowledge of Apple's production plans said the Cupertino, Calif., company has decided to go ahead with the technology, and it will release a phone model using the OLED screens this year (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled; alternate source). The technology allows manufacturers to bend screens in ways they couldn't previously -- such as by introducing a curve at the edge of the phone as in some Samsung models. However, once the phone is manufactured, the OLED screen can't be bent or folded by the user, at least with current technology. Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales. They said Apple would introduce other updates including a USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices instead of the company's original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button, they said. Those updates would give the iPhone features already available on other smartphones.

Comments

Re:Apple finally adopts USB??

[TheRaven64]

Apple with the great choices right there! There is nothing you need firewire for on a freaking iPod... Transfering files works just fine with what was already available and common, USB, and for audio everyone used the minijack, so why was firewire necessary?

The iPod had a 5GB disk, quickly upgraded to 20GB. At the time, USB2 was nonexistent, so USB was limited to 11Mb/s, including protocol overhead (of which there was a lot). It would take an hour or two to fill the original iPod via USB 1.1, FireWire could fill the 20GB one in about 10-20 minutes. Once USB 2 was released, and widely adopted, Apple switched to that.

And USB did power too, so that wasn't an argument either

FireWire supported up to 40W of power. USB was limited to 2.5W (with many ports only providing 0.5W) at the time. Apple used a non-standard extension to get sufficient power over USB until it was finally standardised a couple of years ago.