FireWire was developed by Apple and some other companies, as a competitor to USB, and lost out to USB.
Apple had their own video container and codev formats in quicktime, and those also lost out to others.
They definitely prefer to roll their own, they just don't always succeed in gaining enough market adoption (in the past) or they're told to stop pushing it to the detriment to their users (as recently with USB-c).
Apple was part of the patent pool for FireWire and is also part of the patent pool for USB C and was early to be onboard with Thunderbolt along with Intel.
Apple went all in on USB with the iMac in 1997 well before PCs were completely onboard.
> Apple had their own video container and codev formats in quicktime, and those also lost out to others
Apple’s QuickTime container is part of the standard
https://wiki.videolan.org/QuickTime_container/#:~:text=The%2....
And Apple is in the patent pool for H.264
Apple is listed first as the designer, then second the IEEE1394 working group. Indeed, there's some indication that Apple's development started in the 80's and it wasn't until later it was presented as a standard.[1] Funnily enough, they wanted it to replace SCSI, another technology you noted as a counter to Apple not liking standards they don't control.
> is also part of the patent pool for USB C
Being part of a patent pool doesn't really mean anything to me, given how companies use patents strategically and trade them. Do you have details on what patents may be shared?
> and was early to be onboard with Thunderbolt along with Intel.
They weren't early to onboard, they developed it with Intel (even if Intel held most of the patents and may have done the lion's share of the work, I'm not sure on that point).[2]
> Apple went all in on USB with the iMac in 1997 well before PCs were completely onboard.
Being able to control the hardware completely allows they to make shifts like that, because there was no one "PC" to be completely onboard. That said, they make moves away from it where they could for protocols they had some level of control and or steering of (FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc).
> Apple’s QuickTime container is part of the standard
Apple's QTFF was donated to be the container for MP4, but for a decade or more prior to that it was proprietary (but may have been open to implementation by third parties, I'm not sure). The main problem was that Apple licensed and defaulted to using Sorenson video codecs in their Quicktime framework and shipped it along with their video players, locking down the playing of the format to people willing to purchase the Sorenson codec individually or to those that used their player.
I admit this one is less about using a standard of their own and more just an early example of the platform control and lock-in they're known for now.
> And Apple is in the patent pool for H.264
Again, being in a patent pool for a large company doesn't by itself signal anything to me, given how strategically large orgs use patents. I would need some more info to view this one way or another.
Should Apple have used the PS/2 connector instead?
> That said, they make moves away from it where they could for protocols they had some level of control and or steering of (FireWire, Thunderbolt, etc).
What were they going to use instead of FireWire? USB 1 was painfully slow. Again what other “standard” should they have used?
There was never a Mac that didn’t have USB after the iMac.
You can go back even further Nubus was licensed from Texas Instruments (used in the Mac II in 1987) and they moved to PCI with the second generation PowerMacs in 1996 (?)
My complaint? I'm just calling into question your counterpoint exampkes supplied when someone stated that Apple only likes standards they control. Whether it's warranted or they have good reason to in some cases is somewhat besides the point, they have a long history of developing their own standards, sonetimes because they are addressing a problem that isn't solved by another technology, and sometimes just because they would rather have something they control whether the market segmentation and user confusion it causes is best for the customer or not.
"PCs" were using either parallel or serial ports, in addition to the PS/2 ports for mice and keyboards. None of them were proprietary or if they were, they were widely used so basically standard. USB ports were added easily as expansion cards on those PCs (TBH I don't recall if it was the case already in 1997, don't remember owning any USB peripheral back then)
You know the MP4 standard is based on Quicktime, right?
> MPEG-4 Part 14 is an instance of the more general ISO/IEC 14496-12:2004 which is directly based upon the QuickTime File Format which was published in 2001.
Firewire existed for years before USB: it was designed in the late 80's, roughly 10 years before USB. Development was mostly Apple and Sony, but numerous others were involved in the IEEE-hosted process.
As USB became more capable (Firewire vs USB1 was no contest), it gradually began to replace it. But ultimately, Thunderbolt was its real replacement.
None of them even remember connecting it to a computer past the iPhone 5S.
It’s much more useful on the iPad where you might actually use it as some kind of video editing device and plug an external monitor and ssd in.
...if your computer runs MacOS.
I was surprised to see how unnecessarily annoying it is to transfer videos and photos from an iPhone to a Windows PC.
It’s the kind of thing you don’t really do if you follow the apple flow though. You’d either stream the video from whatever service, or you sync it with apple photos and it will be available on your phone.
Apple officially recommends to install iCloud on the PC and download the files from there, but they didn't let me disable the upload of the files on my PC, so I uninstalled iCloud again.
Then the recommendation was to just download it from iCloud Web. Which I did. But for some reason iCloud download default to a lower resolution (720p video in my case) instead of the full resolution. To do this I had to click on a small button, which then gave me the option to download my own files in full res.
Of course I only noticed that I'd downloaded a lower res after editing a video for 5 hours. All in all, an extremely subpar experience. Every Android phone ever can just transfer files over cable to any PC, for some reason just iPhones have to be complicated...
The USB 2 thing is probably like the Raspberry Pi 4: the SoC only supports 2.0. Older iPads and the Pi4 have a full USB 3.0 controller external to the SoC. Apple likes to re-use the previous year's SoC and no point doing USB 3.0 before. I could see the pro models doing 3.0 since it'll probably be a new SoC
That would be interesting, but like you alluded to it would likely require out-of-SoC tech for the existing A-series chips.
Other than one exception, the A-series SoCs have not shipped with USB 3.x or USB4 support. The 10th gen iPad uses an A-series chip, so it is pretty close to being a "lightning to USB dongle" inside the case.
So it isn't a software or manufacturing nerf - the part does not support USB 3.
And demonstrably so - “downgrading” to DSC 1.2 actually improves those other users refresh rates and HDR support.
This is still “broken” as of Ventura.
You mean like SCSI, FireWire, USB-A, USB-C, USB 3.x, Bluetooth, Qi charging, H264, AAC?