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FYI:
Greenpeace pressured apple to stop using PVC in their plastics around 2007
Apple realised they could gain PR while making more money by having customers needing to rebuy new cables.
You don’t need PVC to create durable cabling.
Well, think of the data transfer rates. One carries voice, which can be in the kb/s
A lightning cable can carry a few gb/s.
All this extra data weighs down the cable, causing it to fail sooner.
You can solve this problem by switching to light-weight data, or by simply filling your cable with helium to counteract the extra weight!
Thanks, Cave Johnson.
He’ll get the nerds in the lab to cook something up.
I’m in tech, I can answer this for OP (on apple’s behalf):
Because fuck you, thats why.
Forced obsolescence. What better way to make money than cut the cost of making a cable that lasts half as long for twice as much that people need regularly? This is an example baked into the very government as it called for initial light bulbs to only last a certain amount of time so they are replaced more often to “stimulate” the market.
You can buy a coiled USB-C cable, I have a couple, they’re pretty sweet. A company called Cable Matters makes them, they generally make quality stuff
Finally a counter-example to enshittification.
Wouldn’t they still fray near the end?
I feel like it wouldn’t really be that hard to do. Just do the coily cable thing. It’s the same reason why springs are coils.
Because then you would only buy one of them
No thanks, at that point I’d rather just a buy a third party one of higher quality.
Back in the day, the phone was property of the phone company, so it was in their best interest not having someone come replace the cable.
Yeah, but even after then the phone cord was still a buy it for life item and it came for free with the phone. They haven’t belonged to the phone company since the 70s at the latest.
What were those cords even made of? Fucking mithril?
People seem to forget how easily phone cords went bad. We had to jiggle them or hold them at weird angles to keep talking.
You also bend, move, carry, unplug/replug, use a charge cable a lot more than we did land line phones.
I don’t remember that at all… Was it before 90s?
I don’t think many of those types of phones were made/used in the 90’s.
Landlines of course were, what are you on about?
They can. There are brands selling durable USB-C cables, I think they cost around 20 Euros each.
For Apple stuff, they will make it durable once their customer base stops being a cult.
'* once the EU will make them
The cables that degraded that way were because they used a more recyclable product, they moved away from it and it stopped being a problem.
That so many of the Apple frayed outside cables survived despite the outside fraying is funny …
Their cables are now braided by default.
The “hating apple” or better yet “tech tribalism” in general is the real cult
Funny, Apple mainstreamed tech tribalism. Remember when they were so so butthurt when android entered the scene, that their whole cult started calling them poor people’s phone? Their whole schtick was being an expensive status symbol? Suing samsung because their phone was a rectangle? Suing a pear brand logo because theirs was an apple. They had to go so low to green bubble android users to.make them seem like outcasts in group chats for teenagers? Tim Apple’s “Buy your mom an iPhone” because they didn’t want to support RCS?
You can “achsually” spin it however the fuck you want, Apple is THE tech tribalist cult, that other companies fawn over. Not the smart ones, the dumb and loyal ones who buy expensive shit no matter what.
Fuck all Big Tech. They’re only after monopolizing the market for data and profits.
Same goes for Google and the others. They have a tribe or flock or cult. All the tech companies want that or have it to some degree. Though some are more obvious.
Yeah you can criticise Apple on many things, but definitely not in build quality and software support. They’re so far ahead of everyone else, it’s not even funny.
What a ridiculous statement… They are pioneers in planned obsolescence. They literally designed a laptop where all of the heat vented directly onto the vulnerable hinge until the screen eventually failed and an iPhone that couldn’t make phone calls until you bought an extra case for it.
You’re literally parroting the same type of tech tribalism bullshit that I’m responding to.
They had a design defect. It happens.
They’ve never sold me a phone that explodes in my pocket though. I guess Samsung also planned that obsolescence?
It’s the “assigning intent” behind a thing that proves the tribalism.
For fucks sake just use the shit you want to use and let other people use the shit they want to use.
I’m not saying they’re perfect, far from that, personally I despise their stupid marketing and clear cut decisions (the CD drive, the jack, etc.), the repairability is abysmal. They had big flukes and made stupid decisions, like fanless laptops, butterfly keyboards and such.
But an iPhone is supported for 10 years software wise, a MacBook is supported for 7 years. The build quality of pretty much all their products is also generally great with the occasional miss. Not many tech manufacturers come close. Maybe I’m mistaken and I’d be gladly proven wrong.
The “planned obsolescence” argument holds as much water as a sieve and always has.
It’s cope. Everyone seems to need to cope about why they got what they got and not the other thing. Nobody can just admit “I got the thing I wanted”
The problem is that you can’t go just off of the price because there are shitty brands that will sell the crappy one that will break early for 20 Euros to fool people into thinking they’ll last.
I actually haven’t had a cable do this since I stopped buying apple cables. I usually will buy just whatever brand I find and they might stop working eventually, but rarely do they fray like those iPod ones used to.
Better yet don’t buy apple products at all.
That’s because Apple’s cables are designed for aesthetics first and everything else second.
My cellphone doesnt even have the audio quality of an old landline…
Planned obsolescence is one of the cornerstones of our economic order.
Pull on the connector instead of the cable and it’ll last 3x longer
While that might be right in some cases, these just had really bad plastic coverings. I had an htc cable made with the same stuff. Without using it just sitting the drawer, it now is cracked all over and the cover is falling apart. Mechanical stress probably would make it break faster, but these cables also just sucked.
Just from oxidation
Also stop resting it on the cord bend while using it in bed. The number of times I have seen this prevented by a 90° adapter is… at least 3.
