Because then they couldn’t sell you a new one for $15 every 3 months.
Can confirm, I buy a 3 pack every year
If you want the actual answer it’s because you can’t. There is very little voltage going through those cables, and there is no data line at all.
If you wanted to recharge your phone through a cable like that it would take about 10 years.
You can get high quality armoured recharge cables, they’re not even all that expensive, you just don’t get them in the box. Apple don’t even give you a charger these days, so is it really all that hard to believe that they would give you the cheapest version of the cable?
Beat me to it. A lot of times, things lasted longer simply because they were less complicated. A phone cord is two wires. A USB-C cable has up to 16, and there is a lot more bandwidth being sent though them. Not to mention all the fancy handshakes that have to be performed in order for all the various standards the cable supports to actually work as intended. Besides just high speed data, you’ve got things like ethernet, HDMI/DP, Thunderbolt, etc. all going down a single cable. A phone cord only has to send analog voice. Honestly it’s a miracle to me that USB-C even works at all, let alone semi-reliably.
Should a single cable really support so many standards and high data rates though? That puts a lot of limitations on what is often just a stupidly overengineered charging cable.
Well just because you don’t utilize all the features of USB-C, that doesn’t make them unnecessary.
For example: my PC refuses to POST after replacing the CMOS battery and I cannot for the life of me figure out why. So in the meantime I’ve been using a USB-C dock for my phone which breaks out the port into full-sized DisplayPorts and USB-A ports, that way I can use my phone as a desktop PC until I can figure out what the hell is wrong with my actual PC. I’m extremely grateful that USB-C has all these standards built-in, otherwise I’d be completely without a computer. The built-in desktop experience on Android works well enough for most tasks.
Enshitification
Because you’d only buy one. They want you to buy many during your lifetime.
cheaping out?
You unplug and replug the top one more often than the bottom one. It’s not a great comparison.
Also there are more thicker wires in usb c.
That’s why I like the chinese brands because you need thick cables for their ultra fast charging tech. Although the fast charging are a bit proprietary so you have to find legitimate ones online when they do break.
Berylium Copper, which holds its shape like a spring more than the usual annealed copper conductor, is probably not used because of berylioses or contact allergies. But, other than being a worse conductor than copper, it would probably be better cool as a coil.
If you want to pay for cables, go ahead and pay for cables.
The only time I’ve had a frayed USB cable was from when I’d be rotting in bed on my phone with it plugged in. Cutting that down solved that problem. These days it feels like it’s the connector itself that needs to be meticulously cleaned and cared for because they only work for a few hundred cycles.
Take your usb cable, wrap it around something round of the size of curl you want and hit it with hot air, being careful not to melt it.
You will achieve the springy tangly mess in the picture. Your cable will now be 2/3 or less of the straight length
OK interesting discussion BUT NOT IF THE EXAMPLE IS A FUCKING LIGHTING CABEL!!!
They can. There are brands selling durable USB-C cables, I think they cost around 20 Euros each.
For Apple stuff, they will make it durable once their customer base stops being a cult.
7 cultists and counting
'* once the EU will make them
The problem is that you can’t go just off of the price because there are shitty brands that will sell the crappy one that will break early for 20 Euros to fool people into thinking they’ll last.
The cables that degraded that way were because they used a more recyclable product, they moved away from it and it stopped being a problem.
That so many of the Apple frayed outside cables survived despite the outside fraying is funny …
Their cables are now braided by default.
The “hating apple” or better yet “tech tribalism” in general is the real cult
Funny, Apple mainstreamed tech tribalism. Remember when they were so so butthurt when android entered the scene, that their whole cult started calling them poor people’s phone? Their whole schtick was being an expensive status symbol? Suing samsung because their phone was a rectangle? Suing a pear brand logo because theirs was an apple. They had to go so low to green bubble android users to.make them seem like outcasts in group chats for teenagers? Tim Apple’s “Buy your mom an iPhone” because they didn’t want to support RCS?
You can “achsually” spin it however the fuck you want, Apple is THE tech tribalist cult, that other companies fawn over. Not the smart ones, the dumb and loyal ones who buy expensive shit no matter what.
Fuck all Big Tech. They’re only after monopolizing the market for data and profits.
Apple mainstreamed tech tribalism
I assure you, from car brands to shoe brands to soda brands, brand tribalism by consumers has always been with us. On the tech side, we saw it with console wars of every generation, PC/accessory brand tribalism, even OS/software tribalism. TVs, radios, portable music players, AV equipment of all types, etc. When cell phones came on the scene, you had significant brand rivalries there, even before smartphones. (You see remnants in this when people get nostalgic about Nokias or Blackberries or Razrs).
Your comment so perfectly encapsulates what I’m talking about.
I use Apple products because I develop on a Unix system that has support from the manufacturer. That’s why I use Apple.
Nobody else provides that for me. I’d prefer to be using i3 on a Linux base but nobody provides that in a manner that ticks the boxes I need to tick for the requirements I provide.
It’s like you are wildly incorrect but having to join the tech fight
You can use an Apple product without being in the cult, but the cult still exists.
Sure. But the cult of anti Apple is on display here in this thread and is wildly MORE pervasive.
Then again it’s largely only kids who give a fuck, the second I take my mom hat off and stop trying to temper extreme mindsets it all disappears for me too.
All the tech in your pocket looks fantastic from my house.
Glad to see someone else mention this. I feel crazy enjoying the hell out of using what is basically “linux + commercial software” while everyone else is just like “Apple bad, too expensive.” Meanwhile my apple laptop and phone were both cheaper than the competition… never let that get in the way of a good narrative, I guess.
That’s exactly what it is.
Planned obsolescence, but my iPhone 11 from 2019 still receives updates. Do any android devices from then still get new Android?
None of my cords that did the fraying ever frayed, I had one friend who’s cord frayed. But it was all over the internet.
It’s called othering when we make shit up about people to categorize them as worse, but since tech isn’t people our baser instincts are fine.
Do any android devices from then still get new Android?
Oneplus 5 released in 2017 is still getting official LineageOS updates. Oneplus One released in 2014 is also getting updates, albeit unofficial ones.
And this is just the brand I’m familiar with, there probably are even older phones kept alive by the community. This isn’t possible with Apple’s hostile ecosystem.
My question wasn’t about Lineage though. OnePlus using lineage officially and supporting it is kind of the exception that proves the rule.
I’m talking which manufacturers offer a comparable product that is supported for as long?
Apple gets shit on for this very thing but Google and Samsung and Motorola were the worst offenders in that regard. Samsung users out here with an phone that stopped getting updates a year later shitting on people with 5 generation old iPhones still being updated regularly, my point entirely is that much of the “this company sucks for X reason” in both directions is typically people hating rather than backed by real shit.
Some stuff is bad, but rarely is any of the hate as bad as people make it out to be. It’s tribalism.
We hate things more than we like them. It’s a pretty human trait.
Same goes for Google and the others. They have a tribe or flock or cult. All the tech companies want that or have it to some degree. Though some are more obvious.
Yeah you can criticise Apple on many things, but definitely not in build quality and software support. They’re so far ahead of everyone else, it’s not even funny.
Their build quality is shit. I had a phone that I would throw into the air and let it land on concrete for funsies. That phone lasted me 5 years. It was a Motorola. The back was plastic, the front was either gorilla glass or plastic. Either way, I didn’t have a case on it, and it didn’t break.
If a phone needs a case, its because the build quality is absolute shit. Every phone should be able to be slammed onto the concrete without a case. It’s the gold standard of build quality.
Build quality has absolutely no ties with how resistant to abuse the product is ? That’s just a completely absurd opinion…
Build quality implies durability. If you needed to put a case on your car to protect it from normal abuse, you’d say the car was poorly made.
What a ridiculous statement… They are pioneers in planned obsolescence. They literally designed a laptop where all of the heat vented directly onto the vulnerable hinge until the screen eventually failed and an iPhone that couldn’t make phone calls until you bought an extra case for it.
I’m not saying they’re perfect, far from that, personally I despise their stupid marketing and clear cut decisions (the CD drive, the jack, etc.), the repairability is abysmal. They had big flukes and made stupid decisions, like fanless laptops, butterfly keyboards and such.
But an iPhone is supported for 10 years software wise, a MacBook is supported for 7 years. The build quality of pretty much all their products is also generally great with the occasional miss. Not many tech manufacturers come close. Maybe I’m mistaken and I’d be gladly proven wrong.
“Repairability” and they were the first ones to make batteries be glued so they can only be repaired by an Apple repair center. 😭
Yeah, that’s what I said?
The build quality is great, the repairability is shit. Both can be true.
Oh, sorry, I misread it lol. Thought you said that they were good quality and good repairability. My bad 😅
Edit: I now upvoted you, now that I better understood.
The “planned obsolescence” argument holds as much water as a sieve and always has.
It’s cope. Everyone seems to need to cope about why they got what they got and not the other thing. Nobody can just admit “I got the thing I wanted”
I wear yalls downvotes as a badge of pride that I triggered some tribalists who had to react but couldn’t respond
They are pioneers in planned obsolescence.
I have owned three laptops since 2004. Powerbook 2004-2014, Macbook Air 2014-2025, Macbook Air 2025-now. This doesn’t feel like planned obsolescence to me? This feels like computers that last way fuckin longer. but whatever. None of these laptops were more than about $800 either. I’m into apple because I’m cheap as hell, IDK man.
You’re literally parroting the same type of tech tribalism bullshit that I’m responding to.
They had a design defect. It happens.
They’ve never sold me a phone that explodes in my pocket though. I guess Samsung also planned that obsolescence?
It’s the “assigning intent” behind a thing that proves the tribalism.
For fucks sake just use the shit you want to use and let other people use the shit they want to use.
This is just whataboutism. Fuck “tech tribalism” and fuck every tech company.
It sure would be whatavoutism if I was trying to make one side the good guy or the other guy specifically the bad guy.
My point entirely is that they all do fucked up shit and pretending your favorite tech company is good while the other is evil is some stupid shit.
Use what you like. Accept there are problems and things that could be done better. Get something else if it ticks your boxes.
But to be a braindead tech tribalist by parroting the narrative that
foo product usersare inherently brainwashed and dumb is irony at its best.
Samsung isn’t good either. Anything closed-sourced and privative is bad by definition.
Thats a idealistic and naive definition, imo.
You’ve summed up this whole site
Exactly. My Aliexpress specials have lasted forever. Buying a “brand” is dumb.
People seem to forget how easily phone cords went bad. We had to jiggle them or hold them at weird angles to keep talking.
You also bend, move, carry, unplug/replug, use a charge cable a lot more than we did land line phones.
… Tell me how young you are without telling me how young you are.
Maybe their family really didn’t use it that often. Even in the 90s, I don’t think my family used the landline phone more than once a day on average. I think that would have only been different in the early 80s and before due to not having answering machines to filter the incoming calls down to those we cared about.
Yeah, but I never saw anyone talk on the phone without also fiddling with the cord with their fingers (often, trying to undo those weird half-twist pairs that would form). Or at least not until cordless phones started getting popular.
I don’t remember that at all… Was it before 90s?
I don’t think many of those types of phones were made/used in the 90’s.
Landlines of course were, what are you on about?
So…. Look at the picture. See the phone? THOSE WEREN’T MADE IN THE 90’s.
Oh you only meant Western Electric Model 2500? Right…
I had one of those until mid 2000’s. I remember fidgeting with the curly umbilical cable thing while on the phone
Well, think of the data transfer rates. One carries voice, which can be in the kb/s
A lightning cable can carry a few gb/s.
All this extra data weighs down the cable, causing it to fail sooner.
You can solve this problem by switching to light-weight data, or by simply filling your cable with helium to counteract the extra weight!
Thanks, Cave Johnson.
He’ll get the nerds in the lab to cook something up.
Calvin’s Dad Explanation Award
extra data weighs down the cable
Does it really? I get that you’re taking the piss, and it won’t have any significant or even perceptible impact, but seriously does it?
Like it exists, right? I might just be tweaking here.
I’m gonna end up full Steve here if i think about it much longer
There is a weight associated with the electrons needed to convey information, but it’s negligible.
Beyond that though, we’re not actually so interested in moving the electrons, but in toggling the electric field. Most of the electrons in the wire stay in the wire, and any that leave are balanced by another coming in on the other end. Electrons can move between the atoms, but if your cable is actually changing the number then something has gone wrong, since laptops don’t typically ionize copper.
It’s a pretty straightforward calculation, since amperage is the number of electrons per second, and the cables has a well documented signaling rate.
It works out to a bit weighing about 2x10^-22 grams for a USB cable.Data is essentially just fancy electric current. Current doesn’t really ‘flow’ so much as propogate a wave similar to a newtons cradle desk toy. A physicist might chime in on this, but no, I don’t think data being transmitted actually weighs anything.
Unless you factor in the interaction between any induction effects and the earths magnetic field. But it’s beyond negligible.
The data exists as electricity, and while electrons have mass, there’s always going to be roughly the same number of electrons in the cable. They’re flowing in a loop across the cable, so more electrons aren’t needed for more data. It’s the pattern they move in that carries the data (kinda).
At least that’s my simplistic view of it. There’s probably some technicalities I’m glossing over, but I think the point stands that a cable carrying more data isn’t heavier due to that data.
It’s only 4 wires, only 2 of which carry data. A 6ft cable transferring at a max usb speed of 80gb/s moving at the slow end of signal propagation through copper of .5c would have less than a kilobyte on it at any time.
