Because then they couldn’t sell you a new one for $15 every 3 months.
I use these on all my cables both ends. This cable is 5 years old and still strong. Costed me 1 rupee per piece. Got a pack of 100 for 100rs (~1 us dollar)
I know what I’m gonna buy later (assuming a USB-C version exists).
It’s agnostic. You can pretty much put it on any cable as long it’s not too thick.
How are they called?
Usually “cable strain relief”
I have Sennheiser HD 280 headphones. They have a telephone cord for a wire. So good. So worth it. Cable still going strong after 6 years. And get this… when it breaks? I can replace it. They make spare parts. Saved me a ton of money in the long run
FYI:
Greenpeace pressured apple to stop using PVC in their plastics around 2007
Apple realised they could gain PR while making more money by having customers needing to rebuy new cables.
Whats the matter with PVC specifically?
Supposedly greenpeace calls it “the poison plastic” and “the most enviromentally damaging plastic”
Gonna have to ask them for their scientific sources.
Personally i think plastics are fine if the product is actually durable. I take good care of my things. My 15 year old ipad mini is practically mint and if it wasnt for “making it more enviromental” i would still be using its original cable also.
Personally i think plastics are fine if the product is actually durable
My problem is this just kicks the can down the road. Some day, no matter what, that plastic is becoming waste. Maybe it gets recycled, but most likely, it doesn’t. If it doesn’t need to be plastic, it should not be plastic. Questioning if it’ll last long enough is just asking if it can last long enough to be someone else’s problem.
Definitely a good point if if doesn’t actually need to be plastic, i highly prefer natural materials overall. But thats not always practical.
I dont get the “someone elses problem” though. If the item is still perfectly usable then why would the next owner not also just want to use it? I personally value a hand me down that “served” my family for ages over “new thing”
If it is broken then it can get a new life by getting recycled.
Under current consumerism the pattern is that shit breaks and you buy it new, which causes us to psychologicly devalue the item (and thus materials) as it ages, i believe this is why so many plastics end up non recycled.
If items where durable, reliable, repairable. People will be more capable to perceive their value and be more concious about what happens to it after it breaks because losing it will hurt. Not quite like but somewhat similar to how we care about what happens to remains after death.
Also things being repairable increases the awareness of the materials because your working with them.
This is the paradox. I still have old cables from 20+ years ago, the new stuff degrades. At least the woven/braided cables seem like they might last longer.
It’s not a paradox. There is a reason why those old cables don’t degrade, and it’s the same reason why fish are full of microscopic shredded plastic that will never go away.
You don’t need PVC to create durable cabling.
And give up the opportunity to get applause for planned obedience? That is not how you capitalism.
Its quite telling that ever since apple got forced to use usb-c the quality of their cables made a huge leap. It’s almost like the availability of competing cables is good for innovation or something.
I feel like it wouldn’t really be that hard to do. Just do the coily cable thing. It’s the same reason why springs are coils.
What were those cords even made of? Fucking mithril?
Forced obsolescence. What better way to make money than cut the cost of making a cable that lasts half as long for twice as much that people need regularly? This is an example baked into the very government as it called for initial light bulbs to only last a certain amount of time so they are replaced more often to “stimulate” the market.
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!
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.
Calvin’s Dad Explanation Award
Thanks, Cave Johnson.
He’ll get the nerds in the lab to cook something up.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Acid in your skin oils is breaking down the plasticizer in the insulation.
Has happened before here, with more than just phone\usb cables.
I’m in tech, I can answer this for OP (on apple’s behalf):
Because fuck you, thats why.
My cellphone doesnt even have the audio quality of an old landline…
Because then you would only buy one of them
No thanks, at that point I’d rather just a buy a third party one of higher quality.
Back in the day, the phone was property of the phone company, so it was in their best interest not having someone come replace the cable.
Yeah, but even after then the phone cord was still a buy it for life item and it came for free with the phone. They haven’t belonged to the phone company since the 70s at the latest.
Just so we are clear, the current iPhone is about a mm thicker than the RJ-11 jack at the end of the phone cord…
