I hate to be that that guy - but a lot of this can be boiled down to careless use. If you pull in the cable to disconnect, you’re eventually going to break it. You’re supposed to pull on the hard plastic part of the connector.
If by “that guy” you mean the guy that didn’t understood the comparison, then yes, you’re “that guy”. We used to mistreat the living shit out of telephone cables and they rarely broke.
Oh I understand the comparison - but it begets the question: just how often did you plug and unplug in your RJ11s from your landline phone? Because we’re not really comparing like-for-like here.
I’m also old enough to remember having to do untangle those cords every month or so and they would eventually start crackling whenever you moved, before eventually not working without any obvious signs of physical damage.
Do you have any real world experience with these cables? The material is shit. It gets stiff and brittle with time and ends up breaking regardless of how well you pamper it.
Yes, I do? Maybe I did just get lucky - but the lightning cable that came with my 6S just recently died after a decade.
It’s sole purpose was to sit at my computer desk to allow me to charge while working from home, in the end there was no splitting or fraying of the cable - it just stopped charging. 🤷🏻♂️
I’ve also still got my Xs and 14 Pro cables, but have largely switched to Qi2 in preparation for upgrading to the 18 Pro.
I had USB cables back in the early days of the tech which lasted years regularly where as the modern ones are designed to break. The point where the cable will bend typically has no reinforcement and is the point of most degradation.
I’ve owned six Apple-made cables, and every single one of them broke like this. The fourth time, I gaslit myself into believing it was my fault, so I babied the cable to an extreme degree to keep it healthy. I only touched the hard plastic, I kept the cable lying in a straight line with no kinks, and I never let any force/heat/sunlight/water touch the cable even a little bit. It still went bad.
I’ve owned dozens of cheap garbage cables I bought at 1/10 the price from many brands, none of them has ever failed.
Anyone who has read or watched Silo will recognize this is because Apple put extreme R&D efforts into making sure their cables fail after an acceptable amount of time to give them plausible deniability in forcing another purchase.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
must be an apple thing lol i have never had this happen
Which brands do you say are longlasting?
idk basically any USB cable. It’s rare that they fail for me in general, though I have a couple that have given out, and I’ve seen this happen to other people, but I’ve never had it happen to me.
Perhaps anecdotal, but I try to avoid unplugging by pulling the wire whenever possible and I also try not to bend it near the connector if I’m using it while charging.
I’ve had it happen with a few Lenovo laptop chargers. Razer mice though, were especially bad at this 10 years ago. Haven’t owned a Razer product since then though, but I’d go through 2 cables per year because of this. Haven’t lost a single cable since changing to other brands though.
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
cheaping out?
Planned obsolescence is one of the cornerstones of our economic order.
You own the Apple cable and are responsible for the repairs, Apple sells replacements, so they’re built to die and require replacement quickly.
Back in the day, the phone company owned the phone and was responsible for the repairs, so they were built to last.
Enshitification
Pull on the connector instead of the cable and it’ll last 3x longer
While that might be right in some cases, these just had really bad plastic coverings. I had an htc cable made with the same stuff. Without using it just sitting the drawer, it now is cracked all over and the cover is falling apart. Mechanical stress probably would make it break faster, but these cables also just sucked.
Just from oxidation
Also stop resting it on the cord bend while using it in bed. The number of times I have seen this prevented by a 90° adapter is… at least 3.
Because I’d rather have the cable die than some super-ruggedised cable with the flexibility of a pencil break the port.
You can have both…
Superb, I can break both my phone and the cable at the same time /s
Though tbf I’ve got stock Apple cables which are years old. I don’t get how people do this.
People seem to forget how easily phone cords went bad. We had to jiggle them or hold them at weird angles to keep talking.
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.
I had one of those until mid 2000’s. I remember fidgeting with the curly umbilical cable thing while on the phone
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…
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.
Profit
That old cord had lead in it. Newer regulations require different materials.
Also the plastic was made from cancer. Like pure 100% distilled cancer in plastic form.
