Reports Say Apple Is Shrinking Its Docking Connector With iPhone 5

jones_supa writes "Two sources have told Reuters that Apple's new iPhone will drop the classic wide dock connector used in the company's gadgets for the best part of a decade in favor of a smaller one. The refresh will be a 19-pin connector port at the bottom instead of the previous 30-pin port 'to make room for the earphone moving to the bottom.' That would mean the new phone would not connect with the myriad of accessories playing a part in the current ecosystem of iPods, iPads and iPhones, at least without an adapter. On the upside, a smaller connector will allow for more compact product designs. Some enterprising vendors in China have already begun offering cases for the new phone, complete with earphone socket on the bottom and a 'guarantee' that the dimensions are correct." Gizmodo writer Adrian Covert says it's for your own good.

Re:Standard connectors? LOL you wish!

[HarrySquatter]

And mini-USB was not consistently used among all phones. I and my girlfriend have a few different model flip phones from just 2 years ago from T-Mobile that all have their own proprietary connector. Again, you are highly exaggerating how consistent USB use was and has been until only recently.

Thinner!

[SuricouRaven]

Why this relentless drive for thinness at Apple? They switched to displayport because VGA/DVI ports were too thick, and now they dropped ethernet from their new retina laptops because the RJ45 connector is too thick. Every time Apple bring out a new iThing, I see the fanboys celebrate how this is the slimmest iThing yet - another 0.25mm shaved from the thickness! Really, once a phone reaches the 'fits in pocket' size, what advantage could be gained for the user in making it slimmer? It's just became some sort of Apple dogma that thinner is better and thinnest is best.

11 pins, free of charge

[John Napkintosh]

Why were they using 30 when they only needed 19? Is some functionality going to be lost in the new connector? Are they serializing some functions that used to be parallel over the cable? Did the originally plan for some functionality they never got around to adding? Maybe just giving themselves the opportunity to remove them later and and create a market for adapters?

Why have any connectors?

[Animats]

Connectors are obsolete on a device that has at least three radios in it. Charging should be inductive, video should be WiFi, and audio should be Bluetooth. Then the thing would be hole-free and could be made waterproof.

Now this [youtube.com] is what Apple should be shooting for in ruggedization.

Re:Standard connectors? LOL you wish!

[cpu6502]

>>> I have yet to see anything truly innovative come out of Apple

I can think of two things:
1984 - mouse based OS (yes they copied it from Xerox, but they were first to put it in a home desktop)

1988(?) - FireWire. A damn fast serial bus. Was used in HD VCRs and camcorders in addition to Macs. Sadly Apple failed to let anyone else use it (so the PC world developed USB instead).

1991 - PowerPC... though I'm not really sure how much Apple really "contributed" to the design beyond the operating system. PPC is the heart of all modern settop game consoles (and also Amiga computers).

Re:Standard connectors? LOL you wish!

[acoustix]

I think his point, however poorly made, was that if they did switch to micro-USB, there would have to be more ports to supplement the additional capabilities the dock connector is used for (line-level analog audio, analog and HDMI video, additional power options, etc).

At the very minimum, there would have to be a second minijack connector to provide line-level audio, in a standardized location across all their devices so that it could still be placed in a dock, along with a separate stabilizing mechanism since otherwise you would have to rely on the minijack connector and micro-USB connector holding the device in place. This sounds like a less elegant solution by far. And is likely the reason that no other manufacturer has a docking standard that works across all of their devices.

Why not provide three ports at the bottom of the device: 1/8" headphone jack, micro USB and micro HDMI? Use those as the docking ports. Viola! No proprietary connectors needed. You can use each of the three ports independently when not docked. The dock would then consist of one, two or all three connectors depending on the functionality of the dock.

Problem solved.

Re:Standard connectors? LOL you wish!

[TheRaven64]

FireWire was already dying by that point. I had a couple of drives that had FireWire 400, FireWire 800 and USB 2. FW800 was clearly superior: I could plug both of them into a single port on my laptop and still not be bottlenecked by the connection. USB2 couldn't quite match FW400 in real-world usage. But there were very few computers with FW400, let alone FW800, so there was little incentive for device manufacturers to use FireWire (and produce more expensive devices, since FireWire was no host-device model).