Results to our iPhone USB-C poll are in: Apple needs to step up

Like any well-adjusted technology enthusiast, you’re probably a big fan of USB-C: reversible, elegant, ubiquitous. Its adoption has been so lauded that’s its little wonder we can’t help but turn our faces in disgust whenever we’re forced to deal with legacy micro-USB (and do not even get us started on mini). But for as much as we like about it, USB-C is a lot more than just a super-handy physical connector, and depending on the devices we’re using with it, there can be a lot of (sometimes confusing) differences about the features it supports.

That’s true not just across manufacturers, but even within the same hardware families — just look at data speeds on Apple’s iPhone 15 and 16 series, where the lower-model phones are stuck with 480Mbps over USB 2.0, while the Pro editions get USB 3.1 Gen 2×1 and blistering 10Gbps performance. That’s an order of magnitude improvement, but you wouldn’t have any real sense of the potential there by just looking at their USB-C ports alone. And this isn’t even touching on differing levels of charging support.

Granted, Apple is a relatively new player in terms of USB-C on phones, but with such a modest lineup of devices, and a reputation for delivering user experiences that “just work,” would we be wrong for expecting more? Is it even fair to compare one manufacturer against the behavior of Android as a platform? It’s definitely a more complicated question than that simple-looking little connector might intimate, so we thought we might as well put it to you:

Has the iPhone done a better job with USB-C than Android?

USB-C support on Android may vary wildly across manufacturers, but either you’re holding Apple to a higher standard, or you think everyone’s doing a pretty similar job, because hardly any of you think Apple’s putting on the best show here.

In the comments, we do see some support for that “higher standard” idea, pointing to Apple’s ridiculously vast resources, for example. But also, there are a lot of voices that seem dismissive of this whole discussion, seemingly uninterested in measuring just how fast their phones charge or how quickly they can transfer files — that they do it at all is good enough. Based on the numbers we see in the actual poll, though, that just seems to be a particularly loud minority.

We guess that leaves the ball in your court, Apple: Go ahead and impress us with your USB-C implementation on next year’s iPhone 17 family.