iPhone Air and 17 stay with lame USB 2.0

As is known, USB-C can do a lot-the standard connection now makes up to Thunderbolt 5 speed. However, buyers from iPhone 17 and iPhone Air, which were presented on Tuesday, benefit from this: Apple has decided to continue to only install lame controllers.

Standard of 2000 on board

That goes out of the official Specifications both models. There is succinct: “USB 2 (up to 480 Mbit/s)”. For classification: USB 2.0 was launched in 2000, at that time still via USB-A. The theoretical maximum throughput is a little more than 50 megabytes per second. USB-2 throughput was also the level that Apple had once used for its proprietary Lightning interface, which has been history in the iPhone since 2023 (with the iPhone 15). Apple has transferred this seamlessly to USB-C.

Apple does not provide any information on why the group remains at the ancient standard. There has been criticism for a long time. This is particularly annoying with the iPhone Air. The group markets the thinnest iPhone of all time (if you disregard the “Camera Plateau”) in the professional corner, which can be seen at the entry-level price of 1199 euros. In addition, an A19-Pro chip (presumably with fewer cores) is also installed, which is also included in the Pro models, not the A19 as in the iPhone 17. So there is only missing controller.

Better transferred wireless

The manufacturer obviously assumes that users are more likely to transmit data by mobile phone or WLAN, which now works much faster depending on the connection. But there are still enough applications that need USB-C. This includes, for example, the connection to other devices via a dock or the connection of storage media, which are often cheaper than Apple’s internal upgrade.

In the meantime, Apple does not install full speed on the iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max. By default, it is not Thunderbolt 4 or even 5 at the start, but USB 3. Here a maximum of 10 GB/s is said to be transferable, which is already significantly better than with 17 and Air. Apple has no change to models 16 per and 16 per max. The iPhone 17 Pro costs at least 1299 euros with 256 GB of storage space.