Bought an iPhone 16 pro max on launch day. Went to the Apple Store with my iPhone 15 pro max, and was encouraged to transfer my data in the store. I sat there for 7 hours, with both phones connected via hard wired Ethernet, and was still not successful. The only use case I can come up with for higher speed physical is direct phone to phone data transfer during these upgrade cycles. I’m appalled by how much doesn’t work on my new phone - passwords that need to be re-established, music that needs to be downloaded. It’s not a traditionally clean “it just works” Apple experience. I’d like to plug a USB cable into both phone, and within 15min, have my new phone exactly like my old phone - exactly the same. It was so bad, I may skip future refresh cycles - and the reason Apple may thing about actually fixing the experience.
It's not as if Android offers anything either. Third party tools like syncthing can be used to backup the camera folder, but the root android folder is protected against copying because of permissions issues that Google refuses to fix. Same if you connect it to an external SSD. You have to root your phone truly be able to make a simple, complete backup. But that comes with a lot of disadvantages for financial apps, security, etc.
Last android phone I bought (my current device, got it as a refurb, ill never buy new again its a waste of money) supports high speed usbc with display and data out. Usb3.2 gen2 I think it is. I specifically chose this phone because of the high speed usb transfer rates. I use the 128gb storage for data transfer all the time and I also like being able to plug it in to usbc monitors and use it as a desktop when I need quick compute functions and don't want to lug a pc around or boot up my actual desktop.
I make sure most of my clients whenever they buy new monitors get usbc hub monitors. The price is bugger all extra and once I show them what I can do with my phone they basically want the same. Not to mention I haven't installed a laptop workstation space that isn't usb c one cable to plugin and go in about 3 years now.
If you use iCloud backups, you get that. Downloads your settings first, then restarts and download all your content. Your phone is an exact copy of what you had before minus the debit/credit cards in Wallet.
And your Google Authenticator TOTP records. Not sure if that’s changed recently, but it caught me out badly a few years ago that it didn’t save them to iCloud.
They want you to use wireless as much as possible. Their dream is 0 physical ports. And I say this as an iPhone user and someone who generally likes using Apple products.
I would buy that except they’ve put in full thunderbolt 4 in the pro so they’ve got an insanely fast interconnect on that phone with the same USB-C port.
Granted, that requires a tb4 controller chip but I don’t know if that’s built into the A18 pro or not.
How does one get decent audio from a phone without a 3.5mm-jack? I am only half joking, and I know this is beating a dead horse. But sometimes you need to make sure the horse is really dead. If I sit with my phone and a pair of headphones with aptX adaptive it is only good if I have direct line of sight and don't move around. This is my experience with all adaptive codecs. Putting my phone in my pocket makes it noticeably worse. If you walk into a store with 2.4ghz WiFi (or too much Bluetooth interference?), suddenly your audio quality tanks even more.
My wife's airpods only supports aac256 at absolute best, meaning it sounds bad most of the time. If I sit with the phone in front of me it is more or less unnoticeable, but putting her phone in my pocket, the cymbals start sounding like splashes in a pool.
And then there is the latency. Anything above 50ms is unbearable. For some reason it works ok in English, but I almost can't watch Swedish (my mother tongue) or German content with that kind of latency.
This is super tangential, but isn't secondary storage basically free now? You could look at it as a % of overall computing spend (phone, laptop, desktop, acccessories, etc) or even just price/TB historically, and either way it's a rounding error.
there is a cross platform push to go all wireless
a lot of the how to's that are about useing
usb,then give instructions for wifi.....so....
......just getting a new cheap wallmart android phone to plug in and transfer files to a linux box is a chore now,but once it's working it's fast
and whole photo albums jump from one device to
another
my internet is strictly through a wifi hotspot on
one phone with mass data,and then a second phone
for general use and a semi broken laptop and an old hdmi screen running mint,which refuses to
connect to more than one wifi thing at a time
and the second phone is devoid of googlish apps
and does not play nice with any web sites doing
multiple redirects(etc),but it is my main camera
so,usb is in constant use
Wrong! Tons of "regular users" want to transfer their image library from their phone to their PC. This is usually dozens of GB of data. Very often the tranfer (from iphone to cheap windows laptop via oxidized cable) is not even completly successful.
My usual recomendation for these people is to buy icloud storage ($$$$) and sync the images over the web, because this is faster an less error prone.
EDIT: therefore the average amount of times anyone who buys a non pro iPhone plugs it into a computer with the intent to transfer data to it is almost 0
iPhone photos are usually in HEIF, and an on-the-fly conversion option that fails after hundred or so photos is enabled by default. Image transfer on iOS works half decent after you find that toggle.
Samsung has offered USB 3.0 support as far back as the Note 3 about 10 years ago. I enjoy the speeds on my own S23 when shooting 4k video and want to edit the dozens of GB it often generates. And the 'extra parts' don't seem to have slowed Samsung down from record-breaking profits.
Let's be honest: useful USB ports aren't going to sell iCloud storage subscriptions.
Didn't they put it in the SoC for the 15 Pro/16 Pro? It's an $800 phone and it's a feature that much cheaper competitors have (e.g. Pixel 8a) . For the times you need it it's handy. I know quite a few people that have been frustrated trying to get GBs of photos off their iPhone too where it runs it problems due to the sheer volume.
They support other niche features like display out so why not support for almost 15 year old USB speeds. How much does it seriously cost to add?
For example, teslas have no spare tires or repair kits, and give you a phone number when you get a flat. This removes your independence in favor of dependence on their road service (when under warranty).
The equivalence depends on what the intent of the statement was. If it was a yardstick to indicate the necessity for something that is rarely used to be fit for purpose and user friendly, I'd say it's apt.
