Others closed up shop or sold what was left of their once-thriving businesses to larger companies. Some survived by shifting to wireless Bluetooth or Wi-Fi accessories, getting away from Apple’s connectors while also appealing to Android users. Years of tight accessory control choked so many third-party accessory makers that Apple nearly killed the Lightning accessory business, to say nothing of the small hardware developers it was trying to profit from. Every time you’ve paid a ridiculously high price for an iPad, iPhone, or iPod accessory, you can be certain that Apple was the reason. Eventually, Apple started to demand advance consultation and approval rights over “third-party” accessories, sometimes down to the packaging and pricing of individual products. Using proprietary connectors enabled the company to build a large and ultimately racket-caliber business licensing parts to accessory makers. But it’s reasonable to think that Apple could have instead used mini- or micro-USB connectors to achieve the same goal, just like virtually all of its competitors did.Īpple didn’t do that because it wanted control over iPod, iPhone, and iPad accessories. Going from FireWire to the Dock Connector to Lightning certainly helped to accomplish that. Just as the company occasionally explains, its engineers have focused on squeezing every last millimeter of unnecessary space out of its iPods, iPhones, and iPads. The two reasons Apple went with proprietary ports are very straightforward: size and control. “This is the new connector for many years to come,” Apple’s Phil Schiller said back in September 2012, six years before the iPad dropped Lightning. Nine years later, it replaced the Dock Connector with the smaller, reversible Lightning connector. The company first adopted Dock Connectors back in 2003 when it switched iPods away from more common FireWire plugs. Apple’s choice to use proprietary connectors in iOS devices (and several Mac accessories) hasn’t been a net positive for either users or third-party developers.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |