They indicated in the pitch for the Pro that they added logic to the new CPU to drive USB 3 at 10gbps. The non-Pro is using last year's CPU, so while yes I guess that means they did "cheap out", I imagine the cost to include 3.0 on the non-Pro is pretty high and most people don't care.

This. Consider the market. Samsung also doesn't add its newly-engineered, top-of-the-line solutions to its lower-end new models.

Almost all the people on this forum are in the target market for the Pro. The standard iPhone is not built for us, nor will most of its users have a problem with 480Mbps-over-wire transfer speeds.

Every S23 model uses the same SoC.

And they are all not competitive with Apple Silicon. What's your point?

Except iPads using older SoCs handle faster USB C speeds just fine.

Which ones?

iPad models which support USB 3 don't use the same chip as iPhones

USB 3.0 isn't really necessary to support higher charging speeds that is mostly through Power Delivery which I believe both the regular 15 and pro support since they both advertise 20W fast charging.

> cheap out by using USB 2.0

Could there have been other tradeoffs? Power consumption, silicon footprint, et cetera. Most people never use USB to transfer data to and from their phones. It would be slightly ridiculous to support 3.0 if it meant tradeoffs in anything practical just so they can say they support a new protocol.

It’s obviously market segmentation.

or USB-C (and its order of magnitude complexity) isn't a SoC peripheral on the already-taped-out A16 but it is on the A17?

On the other hand, the 6th gen Mini uses an A15, and has USB 3 speeds support (only 5Gb but still).

So apple might have had USB3 speeds support in the A15 specifically for the mini, or they might have included USB3 support for a while in all SoC and enable it selectively for segmentation purposes.

That would gel with the comparison between the iPad Air 5th gen and the iPad Pro 5th gen: they both use the desktop-class M1, but the Pro supports full TB3 and USB4, while the Air only supports 10GB.

Dunno, I don't own Apple products and was quite disillusioned with my one workplace MBP. I'm unfamiliar with their newest chips and feature support. Do they maybe have an off-chip USB controller on the tablet?

Honestly, I'd expect any Armv8.3+ or Armv9 to have USB PD/USB-C, Thunderbolt, etc. on the chip itself. USB PD is even halfway-or-more supported on some budget Cortex-M targets. Apple, though, is a special case; the chipmaker and developer are the same, so they have the freedom to say "no USB-C on mobile chips" and include only the features they want.

My post was pure speculation and a little giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The 4th gen iPad Air uses an A14 and also has USB 3 support.

So Apple is using a PCIe USB 3.0 controller for USB 3.0 iPads.

They could've easily done that on the iPhone 15, so it's market segmentation.

> They could've easily done that on the iPhone 15, so it's market segmentation.

Adding additional chips/additional controllers is not "easily" done. The iPads have more space to spare on their boards, and have larger batteries that can absorb the additional power requirements for running those additional chips much easier.

It honestly feels like they want people to buy pro model for more $$$.

Well for now it's likely just the IP blocks (the non-pros uses the A16 which was certainly designed without since none of the 14s was shipped with support).

When the non-pros get the A17 we'll see if they disable the USB3 controller and it's market seg. I'd assume so but...

USB 2.0 data rates have absolutely nothing to do with charging speed. You don't even need to support data (at least, USB data) at all to support fast charging speeds. You just need to support PD, which is on separate, required pins that both phones support.

USB 2.0 vs 3.0 has nothing to do with power delivery.

The only meaningful difference between 2.0 and 3.0 for the iPhone use-case is transfer speeds, and the simple reality is that the overwhelming majority of iPhone owners only use a cable to charge their phone, not to transfer data on/off it.