My iPhone charges from my old Kindle charger. Funny that. I guess that means my iPhone has a standard full-sized USB connector, if your logic is sound.
I have more devices and more cables that use a 30-pin dock connector than micro USB, so that's a pretty standard cable to me that I have at home, work, friend's houses, in my bag, etc.
The USB 2.0 limitation in Lightning would appear to just be either the initial implementation, or all they're choosing to use at the moment. The fact that it has double the pins of a USB 2.0 connector does indicate that there's more going on there, and there seems to theoretically be enough pins available for USB 3.0 if they should choose to implement that in the future.
Lightning has 8 pins. USB 2.0 has 4 pins. Do you really think that it's nothing but a proprietary USB 2.0 connector? It has enough pins to make USB 3.0 work, and I suspect they've planned ahead for such things when it becomes required.
Umm, I complained about microUSB not going in both ways. I'm constantly trying to plug the cable into my Kindle upside down, and that cable is constantly falling out.
As for microUSB 3.0, are you seriously saying that it's not bad because microUSB 3.0's connector is only slightly larger than full-sized USB? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the "micro" part there? About the only thing positive you can say about it is that it's thinner than a standard USB connector. It's a joke of a connector; instead of adding additional pins to a standard microUSB port, as Samsung did, they went and made something that positively screams "worst compromise from a committee".
Micro USB also sucks if you want to support anything faster than USB 2.0 in the future. There is a micro USB 3.0 connector, but it's a joke, the same width as a full-sized USB 3 connector with a bizarre dual-socket thing going on.
No, but microUSB being a terrible and dead-end obsolete connector is a better excuse. Locking yourself down to USB 2.0 speeds for years to come would be idiotic.
They could have, but micro USB isn't a terribly good connector, and MHL isn't a terribly good standard. They both have issues, some of which Lightning tries to address (how well it succeeds is yet to be determined). microUSB is also a dead-end connector seeing as how adopting it means being stuck with USB 2.0 speeds forever (microUSB 3.0 has a substantially larger connector that achieves backwards compatibility in the most braindead manner possible). While Lightning is only shipping with a USB 2.0 cable to start, that doesn't rule out using the same connector for USB 3.0 in the future, or perhaps something else entirely, if the device supports it.
They agreed to no such thing (The EU's voluntary agreement gives other options, which Apple took). They've done enough unscrupulous things that you don't need to make stuff up.
To be fair we're not really sure what speeds it provides; all we know is the only cable they're shipping now is a lightning to USB 2.0 cable. It looks like there's enough pins for USB 3.0 if the equivalent of the shield is conductive (it's not clear to me that GND and GND_DRAIN really have to be connected to separate pins anyhow), and it's entirely possible they plan to use active cables to get higher speed outputs in the future anyhow (who knows what the native signaling format is).
Perhaps, but the last proprietary physical connector Apple developed ended up as an industry-wide royalty free standard. That'd be miniDP, which can be found now on laptops from most companies (even Microsoft's surface devices), and is part of the DisplayPort 1.2 spec. The connector was later used for Intel's Thunderbolt spec, which you'll eventually find in laptops and desktops from all manufacturers (it's currently only available in a few PC motherboards, but it's coming).
The Samsung Galaxy S III doesn't charge from a microUSB port. It has an 11-pin monstrosity that looks like a microUSB port that they can't legally call a microUSB port.
MHL doesn't, however, allow the device to power the adapter needed to actually connect it to anything (like a TV). And since MHL doesn't define any connector standard, the convention of violating the USB spec by hijacking micro USB ports isn't even consistent.
Want to connect your Samsung Galaxy S III to an HDMI television? No problem, you'll just need an 11-pin to 5-pin MHL adapter, a 5-pin MHL to HDMI adapter, some sort of external USB power source (MHL doesn't guarantee power, so not all devices can power an adapter properly), and a USB-to-micro-USB adapter to get the power to the MHL adapter... Oh yeah, and an HDMI cable.
If I want to connect an iDevice to a television, I need one adapter, and one HDMI cable. Two components. If I want to connect an MHL device to a television, I potentially need up to six components.
Why would I ever want to do this? MHL is a terrible idea on so many levels, and even when it works perfectly (with the minimum possible number of components), you've still managed to violate the USB spec.
MHL is not USB (completely unrelated protocols/signaling with no commonlity), and MHL does not define any connector standard whatsoever. It's up to the implementer to decide what port to use; the convention (not standard, and not universal) is to use a standard micro USB connector, but doing that is actually a violation of the USB standard, which explicitly forbids doing exactly this (for the same reason they refuse to recognize eSATAp connectors).
For all we know, Apple's new connector may support MHL.
Except micro USB limits you to a single orientation (slashdot users might not care about that kind of thing, but my parents sure as hell do), and if you want something the same size as a lightning connector, micro USB limits you to 480 Mbps, which is pretty backwards-thinking.
Can you plug a USB connector in in any orientation? That's a pretty big aspect of the user experience (the less technically oriented you are, the more annoying that's going to be), and the easiest solution to that is to just design a connector and standard that supports being plugged in either way. Micro USB doesn't do that, for whatever reason. Another aspect is performance. The standard micro connector only works for USB 2.0, after that you need a bizarrely massive connector for micro USB 3.0.
Micro USB doesn't meet all of Apple's requirements. They've been pretty mum about what and how they're using the new connector, but micro USB is certainly not orientation independent, and the traditional connector you find on smartphones is limited to low speed (USB 3.0 uses a different and much larger micro connector). It's hard to figure out if Apple's decision to go their own way for a dock adapter is justified, but I'd point out that the last time they came up with a new and proprietary connector... the entire industry adopted it. I'm referring to mini displayport, which Apple developed as a proprietary variant on DisplayPort, but made it royalty free and got it into the DisplayPort standard itself.
Connectors are not automatically evil just because they're developed by Apple, and designed-by-committee standards are not always the best solution to a company's individual problems. If DisplayPort had been the end-all be-all connector, then we wouldn't have seen miniDP largely supplant it.
For some, it makes sense. Bell, for example, has no GSM network; they migrated from CDMA (EVDO) to HSPA+. Disabling 3G on a Bell iPhone would simply cut all connectivity.
Define "piece of shit"; the most recent Intel iGPUs outperform low-end discrete nVidia and AMD cards, and their drivers are decent these days (particularly on Linux, where they've put a lot of effort).
I fired up Portal 2 on an Ivy Bridge Mac Air recently, at native resolution (1400x900), on the default settings (which had pretty much everything on "high"). It got ~40 FPS in typical gameplay. Not exactly setting the world on fire, but a pretty impressive showing for an iGPU.
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My iPhone charges from my old Kindle charger. Funny that. I guess that means my iPhone has a standard full-sized USB connector, if your logic is sound.
I have more devices and more cables that use a 30-pin dock connector than micro USB, so that's a pretty standard cable to me that I have at home, work, friend's houses, in my bag, etc.
The USB 2.0 limitation in Lightning would appear to just be either the initial implementation, or all they're choosing to use at the moment. The fact that it has double the pins of a USB 2.0 connector does indicate that there's more going on there, and there seems to theoretically be enough pins available for USB 3.0 if they should choose to implement that in the future.
Lightning has 8 pins. USB 2.0 has 4 pins. Do you really think that it's nothing but a proprietary USB 2.0 connector? It has enough pins to make USB 3.0 work, and I suspect they've planned ahead for such things when it becomes required.
Fortnight.
... then you'd better watch out when the duck starts asking you if you know John Connor.
Umm, I complained about microUSB not going in both ways. I'm constantly trying to plug the cable into my Kindle upside down, and that cable is constantly falling out.
As for microUSB 3.0, are you seriously saying that it's not bad because microUSB 3.0's connector is only slightly larger than full-sized USB? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of the "micro" part there? About the only thing positive you can say about it is that it's thinner than a standard USB connector. It's a joke of a connector; instead of adding additional pins to a standard microUSB port, as Samsung did, they went and made something that positively screams "worst compromise from a committee".
No, it doesn't. Samsung has a proprietary 11-pin MHL implementation built into the socket that puts it in violation of the microUSB spec.
The agreement says "It's perfectly OK to do XYZ", they did XYZ, how is that in violation of the spirit of the agreement?
I think you mean that it violates what you would like the spirit of the agreement to be.
Micro USB also sucks if you want to support anything faster than USB 2.0 in the future. There is a micro USB 3.0 connector, but it's a joke, the same width as a full-sized USB 3 connector with a bizarre dual-socket thing going on.
No, but microUSB being a terrible and dead-end obsolete connector is a better excuse. Locking yourself down to USB 2.0 speeds for years to come would be idiotic.
They could have, but micro USB isn't a terribly good connector, and MHL isn't a terribly good standard. They both have issues, some of which Lightning tries to address (how well it succeeds is yet to be determined). microUSB is also a dead-end connector seeing as how adopting it means being stuck with USB 2.0 speeds forever (microUSB 3.0 has a substantially larger connector that achieves backwards compatibility in the most braindead manner possible). While Lightning is only shipping with a USB 2.0 cable to start, that doesn't rule out using the same connector for USB 3.0 in the future, or perhaps something else entirely, if the device supports it.
They agreed to no such thing (The EU's voluntary agreement gives other options, which Apple took). They've done enough unscrupulous things that you don't need to make stuff up.
To be fair we're not really sure what speeds it provides; all we know is the only cable they're shipping now is a lightning to USB 2.0 cable. It looks like there's enough pins for USB 3.0 if the equivalent of the shield is conductive (it's not clear to me that GND and GND_DRAIN really have to be connected to separate pins anyhow), and it's entirely possible they plan to use active cables to get higher speed outputs in the future anyhow (who knows what the native signaling format is).
Your Samsung Galaxy S3 also doesn't have a standard connector. It has a wonderful proprietary 11-pin connector that they can't legally call micro USB.
Perhaps, but the last proprietary physical connector Apple developed ended up as an industry-wide royalty free standard. That'd be miniDP, which can be found now on laptops from most companies (even Microsoft's surface devices), and is part of the DisplayPort 1.2 spec. The connector was later used for Intel's Thunderbolt spec, which you'll eventually find in laptops and desktops from all manufacturers (it's currently only available in a few PC motherboards, but it's coming).
The Samsung Galaxy S III doesn't charge from a microUSB port. It has an 11-pin monstrosity that looks like a microUSB port that they can't legally call a microUSB port.
MHL doesn't, however, allow the device to power the adapter needed to actually connect it to anything (like a TV). And since MHL doesn't define any connector standard, the convention of violating the USB spec by hijacking micro USB ports isn't even consistent.
Want to connect your Samsung Galaxy S III to an HDMI television? No problem, you'll just need an 11-pin to 5-pin MHL adapter, a 5-pin MHL to HDMI adapter, some sort of external USB power source (MHL doesn't guarantee power, so not all devices can power an adapter properly), and a USB-to-micro-USB adapter to get the power to the MHL adapter... Oh yeah, and an HDMI cable.
If I want to connect an iDevice to a television, I need one adapter, and one HDMI cable. Two components. If I want to connect an MHL device to a television, I potentially need up to six components.
Why would I ever want to do this? MHL is a terrible idea on so many levels, and even when it works perfectly (with the minimum possible number of components), you've still managed to violate the USB spec.
MHL is not USB (completely unrelated protocols/signaling with no commonlity), and MHL does not define any connector standard whatsoever. It's up to the implementer to decide what port to use; the convention (not standard, and not universal) is to use a standard micro USB connector, but doing that is actually a violation of the USB standard, which explicitly forbids doing exactly this (for the same reason they refuse to recognize eSATAp connectors).
For all we know, Apple's new connector may support MHL.
Except micro USB limits you to a single orientation (slashdot users might not care about that kind of thing, but my parents sure as hell do), and if you want something the same size as a lightning connector, micro USB limits you to 480 Mbps, which is pretty backwards-thinking.
Can you plug a USB connector in in any orientation? That's a pretty big aspect of the user experience (the less technically oriented you are, the more annoying that's going to be), and the easiest solution to that is to just design a connector and standard that supports being plugged in either way. Micro USB doesn't do that, for whatever reason. Another aspect is performance. The standard micro connector only works for USB 2.0, after that you need a bizarrely massive connector for micro USB 3.0.
Micro USB doesn't meet all of Apple's requirements. They've been pretty mum about what and how they're using the new connector, but micro USB is certainly not orientation independent, and the traditional connector you find on smartphones is limited to low speed (USB 3.0 uses a different and much larger micro connector). It's hard to figure out if Apple's decision to go their own way for a dock adapter is justified, but I'd point out that the last time they came up with a new and proprietary connector... the entire industry adopted it. I'm referring to mini displayport, which Apple developed as a proprietary variant on DisplayPort, but made it royalty free and got it into the DisplayPort standard itself.
Connectors are not automatically evil just because they're developed by Apple, and designed-by-committee standards are not always the best solution to a company's individual problems. If DisplayPort had been the end-all be-all connector, then we wouldn't have seen miniDP largely supplant it.
The answer is quite obvious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7yfISlGLNU
For some, it makes sense. Bell, for example, has no GSM network; they migrated from CDMA (EVDO) to HSPA+. Disabling 3G on a Bell iPhone would simply cut all connectivity.
I see the option on iOS 5.1.1 on Fido (Rogers).
Define "piece of shit"; the most recent Intel iGPUs outperform low-end discrete nVidia and AMD cards, and their drivers are decent these days (particularly on Linux, where they've put a lot of effort).
I fired up Portal 2 on an Ivy Bridge Mac Air recently, at native resolution (1400x900), on the default settings (which had pretty much everything on "high"). It got ~40 FPS in typical gameplay. Not exactly setting the world on fire, but a pretty impressive showing for an iGPU.