I keep seeing posts that apple plans to throttle capabilities of USB-C cords if they are not “made for iPhone” certified, but how can an iPhone ‘know’ if a cord is licensed or not? Aren’t they all made of the same stuff?

Comments

You must log in or register to comment.

TehWildMan_ t1_jael281 wrote on February 28, 2023 at 9:40 PM

#2,127,285

To my understanding, apple controls the design of chips placed between the host and device. No communication chip would indicate it's an unlicensed cable

[deleted] t1_jaemy0o wrote on February 28, 2023 at 9:53 PM

#2,128,064

[removed]

p28h t1_jaeok18 wrote on February 28, 2023 at 10:03 PM

#2,128,742

Phone chargers already convey more than just electricity. Any 'smart charger' or similar will include some data exchange through the cable, so that the charger can actively change its voltage rates in a way that the phone's battery and programming can take advantage of.

The construction of a cable has enough room for a small chip to interact with what it plugs in to. If Apple wants to make their cords proprietary and not just the charger, then they can include a small chip that adds a small amount of data to the interaction. Then the programming of the phone can change how it takes advantage of the charger based on the existence (or lack) of this extra data.

A similar practice happens with ink and toner cartridges. Off brand cartridges can be rejected by a printer's programming, even though the only difference are the chips and wiring that interacts with the printer to tell it "on brand cartridge" or not.

Prestigious_Carpet29 t1_jaev1a6 wrote on February 28, 2023 at 10:48 PM

#2,131,435

I don't know about modern charging cords, but not very long ago some Apple USB/charging cables had slightly "non-standard" value termination/load resistors (passive components costing less than a cent) in them, which meant the Apple device could tell whether it was an "Apple" cable or a generic standard one...