Of course you can use a cable, but they are unreliable. They tend to break, corrode, get dirty, disappear, have incomparable ends(one side USB-A, the other one micro USB, lightning - whatever) that one of the devices don't accept.

They are also bulky and the transfer speeds are slow. Airdrop can transfer gigabytes of data in minutes, which is only possible with the latest wired interfaces that only the newest devices have and not all support file transfers.

iPhones tend to last 3-5 years or even more and iPhones from different generations can transfer each other files through AirDrop. Not everyone has the money to update their phone each year and many who can update think it's wasteful to do so that they can use the latest wired file transfer method.

You recommend buying 5-10m cable and connect people on different seats in the bus/plane/pool/whatever? Which century is this?

Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!

Uh, I'm on Android ans I use Syncthing, not a câble.

" Android users are carrying around data transfer cables?

Hey guys, get a load of this!"

...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket.

I would love to see this caricature of ios users, what dongle do you imagine we carry and what purpose does said dongle serve?

I was mostly thinking about Macs at the time I made the joke, because very often an iOS user is also a Mac user. Where I work, Mac users always have to carry around dongles.

I think it is the other way around -- almost always a Mac user will be an iOS user, but there are plenty of iPhone users without Macs. At least in the US. iPhones seem to be around 50%-ish of sales in recent years, while Macs are not as popular, somewhere around 15%.

https://9to5mac.com/2021/07/13/mac-market-share-q2-2021/

https://www.phonearena.com/news/apple-iphone-record-sales-us...

Of course, there are lots of competing estimates for this sort of thing, but the numbers are so far apart that I don't think it matters too much.

Personally, I have an iPhone because I'm completely uninterested in cellphones and just want something that I don't have to think about too much/will be supported for a while. My computers all run Linux, because computers are cool, and fun to tinker with. Maybe someone who grew up in the era where cellphones weren't so useless will have a different perspective, though.

WRT dongles -- I dunno. Some of the popular Macbook models don't have HDMI ports, right? That seems pretty annoying. But my ZenBook lacks a headphone jack! The moral of the story is I guess that OEMs just want to fill our pockets with dongles. Or maybe selling replacement dongles is the solution to the post Moore's law era, since we don't have to replace our PCs anymore.

That makes sense, thanks for the info. Where I work there are lots Mac users, so the Venn diagram of iPhone users who use a PC isn't as noticeable. :D

Really depends. Our company is entirely Mac. Everything “just works” wirelessly. Like AirPlay for conference rooms, my external monitor is USB-C, etc. No dongles necessary. It’s only when going to other clients where I need to carry around dongles because they don’t support AirPlay or their Wifi network requires several days advanced notice and a urine test before you can get access.

ah I see. with regard to Macs, I skipped from the 2015 macbook model to the 2021 macbook model and I probably would have held out longer and therefore never needed a dongle, but I digress.

back to iOS. no dongles for me there either. my headphones have been wireless for almost a decade, and the charging ports are pretty ubiquitous.

“ ...says the guy with a huge dongle in his pocket”

No, just happy to see you