Submitted 9 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/31/24057392/apple-vision-pro-battery-lightning-cable
Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables::The Vision Pro’s battery connector is removable once you press the eject button, and it uses a 12-pin connector that looks like a wider version of a Lightning cable.
Honestly I appreciate Apple engineers’ sense of humor here
Lol, if apple discontinues vision pro and your battery swells, you only have eWaste left
You likely have waste regardless
Now, that’s petty as fuck Mind you, they’re part of the consortium that made USB-C a thing…
It’s probably called a Lightning cable.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Ray Wong of Inverse discovered a hidden joy today: The Apple Vision Pro power cable connects to the battery with what may well be Lightning’s final form.
Using a SIM removal tool, he pushed into a small hole in the silver external battery pack of the Vision Pro next to the cable, and…
Out it popped, revealing what looks like a bigger, 12-pin version of the connector Apple’s iPhone moved away from last year.
Nilay Patel, Verge editor-in-chief and Vision Pro reviewer, gave it a shot, and what do you know?
Like a Palpatinian twist, somehow, Lightning returned, with all the hallmarks of Apple’s outgoing connector, just wider and with more pins.
Whether this was Apple intentionally propping up the crumbling walls of its garden or it’s just trolling everyone after the EU essentially forced it to switch the iPhone to USB-C, it’s a funny discovery:
The original article contains 228 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 36%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Like a Palpatinian twist, somehow, Lightning returned,
Lmao
And that’s the joke we went with? Not the quip that was tailor made for exactly this situation?
Everyone’s right, journalism is trash these days.
Is it just for power, or does it double as some kind of data cable?
It has 24 pins. Power would be two or three pins.
etchinghillside@reddthat.com 9 months ago
Im sure there’s a very legitimate reason why usbc wasn’t viable.
Tangent5280@lemmy.world 9 months ago
money?
HelloHotel@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That, the law not applying to this specific thing, and durability. The suits chose due to the former amd the engineers the latter.
abhibeckert@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think it’s reasonable.
First of all they didn’t want to put a battery on the headset. Fair enough, even without a battery it’s heavier than most headsets.
That decision means the cable doesn’t just need to provide average power consumption, it also needs to be able to handle peak power consumption. Chances are it’s somewhere inc the vicinity of a Mac Mini - which has a 185 Watt power supply.
USB can provide up to 240 Watts, however it needs relatively high voltage to do that over thin cables permitted in the USB specification. 48 Volts for 240 Watt power delivery and 20 Volts for 100 Watts.
Vision Pro is only 13 Volts - which means that cable almost certainly has much thicker internal power cables than most USB cables. If you tried to power a Vision Pro over a standards compliant thin USB cable it would likely be a fire risk.
Apple could have made it work with a USB cable but they would have had to use 48 Volts, and that likely would’ve meant transforming the 48V power supply down to 13 Volts which is needed by the headset… and voltage changes are not free. You lose power, which means less battery life from the same size battery. Again - battery life is an area where Vision Pro isn’t really good enough already. They didn’t need to do anything that makes it worse.
apemint@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There’s nothing reasonable about these assumptions.
There’s no way the VisionPro gets even close to 100W. Why? Because heat dissipation. The vast majority of power drawn by semiconductors is dissipated as heat and, in a device that’s strapped to someone’s face, there’s simply no way to dissipate hundreds of watts.
Also, knowing the battery pack size and battery life, it’s easy to guesstimate the power consumption.
Even if we assume the double of that 30W, it’s well within USB-C standards.
XeroxCool@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I think you’re confusing volts and amps. Higher amperage wire has thicker copper conductors. Higher voltage wire has better insulation and some standards about how far connections have to sit. Raising voltage increases the chance of sparks, but amperage is what runs into heat problems with modern insulation. Wattage (power) is simply Volts x Amps. To get higher wattage, you can increase volts or amps (or both of course), depending on what materials and devices you have available. The whole point of going to higher voltages in usb is to carry more power without making the cables thicker and without overheating thin wires.
Most circuit boards are 5v. I’m sure Apple already has a converter on board. Also, the DC conversion problem is outdated - both on difficulty and inefficiency. Solid state devices are able to switch power on and off at a frequency to make an onboard converter coil work with the same efficiency as AC. The little extra heat lost from the switchers is made up for by not wasting time/energy on phase cycling. Check out “buck buck” converters.
Volts, amps, and watts are all different units and do not interchange. They are related, but serve different functions.
Fun fact: powerlines all use much higher voltages on the transmission wires than what you have in your house. The lower amperage (but same wattage) uses less material for wiring and loses less energy as heat along the way. North American houses have 120v, the transformers on the nearest telephone poles drop it from 440v, and the overhead lines are 440,000v with various possibilities in between substations
CucumberFetish@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That’s… not how it works.
BeatTakeshi@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Congratulations
HelloHotel@lemm.ee 9 months ago
That makes sense.
iarigby@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Thank you for the explanation
AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Probably whenever the project got started they weren’t moving towards usb-c yet. Through the design iterations and redesigns it somehow stuck because it worked and no one at apple had a complaint.
Kbobabob@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Of cour$e they didn’t. Don’t want anyone el$e to be able to $ell acce$$tries.
schmidtster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Could have been hard wired, but atleast this is replaceable.
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 9 months ago
yay, I’m glad I can buy a spare proprietary connector from Apple Inc™