I honestly don’t get why people are so furious about this. I asked my two siblings, two friends from my uni days and two friends from work and none of them have used the Lightning (soon to be USB-C) port for anything but charging and music.

None of them even remember connecting it to a computer past the iPhone 5S.

There is basically no point plugging an iPhone in to a computer. It’s so much more convenient to use airdrop or cloud storage.

It’s much more useful on the iPad where you might actually use it as some kind of video editing device and plug an external monitor and ssd in.

> There is basically no point plugging an iPhone in to a computer

...if your computer runs MacOS.

I was surprised to see how unnecessarily annoying it is to transfer videos and photos from an iPhone to a Windows PC.

It’s pretty easy to move files on and off the iPhone using a usb/portable ssd and the files, hardest part would be you need a usb to lightning otg cable which is somewhat uncommon.

It’s the kind of thing you don’t really do if you follow the apple flow though. You’d either stream the video from whatever service, or you sync it with apple photos and it will be available on your phone.

When I plugged in the iPhone via cable to my Windows PC, I could only extract pictures which were taken recently, god knows why.

Apple officially recommends to install iCloud on the PC and download the files from there, but they didn't let me disable the upload of the files on my PC, so I uninstalled iCloud again.

Then the recommendation was to just download it from iCloud Web. Which I did. But for some reason iCloud downloads default to a lower resolution (720p video in my case) instead of the full resolution. To do this I had to click on a small button, which then gave me the option to download my own files in full res.

Of course I only noticed that I'd downloaded a lower res after editing a video for 5 hours. All in all, an extremely subpar experience. Every Android phone ever can just transfer files over cable to any PC, for some reason just iPhones have to be complicated...

As long as it has DP alt-mode for HDMI, I'm happy. Unlike Lightning that doesn't do that, so they package a full h264 decoder into that HDMI adapter.

The USB 2 thing is probably like the Raspberry Pi 4: the SoC only supports 2.0. Older iPads and the Pi4 have a full USB 3.0 controller external to the SoC. Apple likes to re-use the previous year's SoC and no point doing USB 3.0 before. I could see the pro models doing 3.0 since it'll probably be a new SoC

> As long as it has DP alt-mode for HDMI, I'm happy.

That would be interesting, but like you alluded to it would likely require out-of-SoC tech for the existing A-series chips.

> It will probably still be nerfed like the low end iPad that has USB C. But still transfers at USB 2 speeds

Other than one exception, the A-series SoCs have not shipped with USB 3.x or USB4 support. The 10th gen iPad uses an A-series chip, so it is pretty close to being a "lightning to USB dongle" inside the case.

So it isn't a software or manufacturing nerf - the part does not support USB 3.

Fine for me, I never transferred anything over a wire between my phone and another device. It’s way more annoying to have to deal with a different charger.