What Apple decides to do with the upcoming iPhone’s USB-C port will likely forge a new standard of cables and accessories.
Why is that? Although you could create much more detailed image files and higher resolution photos with that big sensor, there was no upgrade to the data transfer speed of the USB 2.0 Lightning port.
As any content creation professional has experienced, transferring images and video from your iPhone to your Mac using a Lightning cable is agonizingly slow. First, the Photos app has to synchronize and index the file listings and thumbnails, which takes a while. Then you have to do an import procedure.
If you have a hundred 75MB ProRAW photographs (7500 MB) you need to transfer from your iPhone 14 Pro, it might take you upwards of two minutes at 480 megabits per second or roughly 60 megabytes per second (MB/s), assuming optimal transfer rates.
Did I upgrade to the iPhone 14 Pro Max from my iPhone 13 Pro Max last year? Yes, because when you are on the iPhone Upgrade Program, short of loan termination payments, you effectively swap one monthly payment for another. But I have to say that it was not as big of an improvement as I liked because, as a food photographer, it did not improve my creative content workflow or productivity at all; the data transfer was as slow as it ever was.
That was last year. As I write this, the anticipated iPhone 15 launch is just two weeks away. While there are a lot of rumors and spy photos about what components are due to be upgraded (the camera is suspected to incorporate a new «periscope» design for improved optical zoom, among other things), very little is «confirmed» in terms of what we can expect from the phone.
But we know with almost complete certainty that the iPhone 15 will use USB-C. Why is that? Because the European Union has decreed that by the end of 2024, all smartphones and tablets must use the same USB-C connector.
