Enshitification
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’m just thinking about the fact that they really GOTTA stop making white charger cables
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.
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.
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
I’ve had them for over 15 years. Still on original cable.
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.
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.
Whats the matter with PVC specifically?
Can’t burn or recycle it without releasing chlorine
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.
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”
Because eventually, inevitably, there can’t be a next owner and it becomes garbage. Then, you’re right back to contributing to plastics pollution because while you can say that
If it is broken then it can get a new life by getting recycled
The reality is that a huge portion of plastic doesn’t get 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.
I think you’d need a massive cultural shift to make it plausible, not just different stuff. And while we should be recycling, I don’t think it’s the right emphasis right now because recycling is largely an attempt by the oil and plastics companies to put the onus on us for the environmental harm caused by their product. It’s an attempt to fabricate an excuse to produce things out of plastic that really don’t need to be, and we’ve fallen for it. Of course we should recycle all the plastic we use, but we still shouldn’t be using plastic anywhere we don’t have to. There’s a reason the saying is “reduce, reuse, recycle”. They’re in order of priority, and recycling is the last defense. We need to start by significantly reducing the amount of plastic we use.
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.
I understand what you’re getting at, although I think that I maybe have had the majority of plastic removed from my body with how much blood was removed from me. Actually it wouldn’t surprise me if I was a blood bank for the ER when I was in the hospital last year.
The plastic is in your water and food. If you have organic mass, you have microplastics in you.
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
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.
Calvin’s Dad Explanation Award
Thanks, Cave Johnson.
He’ll get the nerds in the lab to cook something up.
I’m in tech, I can answer this for OP (on apple’s behalf):
Because fuck you, thats why.
You can buy a coiled USB-C cable, I have a couple, they’re pretty sweet. A company called Cable Matters makes them, they generally make quality stuff
The idea of a spring plus the poor retention of USB-C just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. Seems like these would just be a lot of cable coiled up to make a short cable.
I like guitar cables that coil like this, they don’t get tangled easily
Finally a counter-example to enshittification.
That’s actually a more shitty cable. The USB spec gives a maximum cable length based on when wire length will start to pick up more interference and impact data rates.
Basically this is a curly cable that can’t be as long as it otherwise would, and if you try it’s going to actively try to pull itself out of the device because it’s a spring.Wouldn’t they still fray near the end?
I’ve bought some good quality ones of these and because the coil pulls on the connection it often causes a kink failure near the connector.
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.
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…
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.
Exactly. My Aliexpress specials have lasted forever. Buying a “brand” is dumb.
'* once the EU will make them
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Samsung isn’t good either. Anything closed-sourced and privative is bad by definition.
Thats a idealistic and naive definition, imo.
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.
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
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.
Because then you would only buy one of them
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.
No thanks, at that point I’d rather just a buy a third party one of higher quality.
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.
Planned obsolescence is one of the cornerstones of our economic order.
