Many have said that the iPhone will drop the charging port in the future. There is a small problem that many will find to be a major flaw: you can hardly do anything wirelessly while using a VPN.
To even use things as simple as AirDrop you need to disable your VPN on both the host and the receiving end (update: may not require it on the receiver, not sure about the specifics).
Because of this, I still find that transferring files (or doing anything else) via cable to be a much more robust option that actually works all the time without my having to guess what the issue is. I mean, sure, maybe we could get by without a port. But do it’s highly obnoxious discovering small issues like this which compromise the reliability with which I use my device. It took me a long time to find out why my AirDrop and Sidecar weren’t working half the time. I guess that’s also because of Apple’s strong desire in being so closed-off – you can hardly debug issues like this – but that’s a different topic for a different day.
There are many ways that they can remove the lightning port yet still allow cabled data transfer; they can use something like the smart connector on the iPad Pro, or use MagSafe to carry data.
I’ve never needed to disable my VPN to use AirDrop, AirPlay, or AirPrint. I’m not an expert on VPN services, so that could be different depending on which service you use or what settings you have, but it’s never been a problem for me and I’ve never had to reconfigure my VPN to allow those services. This is true across iPhone, iPad, and Mac for me, and applies both on WiFi and cellular data with VPN connected.
The biggest problem with portless phones is carplay.
The average age of a car on the road in the US is almost 15 years. There are a lot of cars that only have wired carplay (or Android auto). You can bet most of those people will switch to Android before they buy a new car if they lose wired carplay.
I just airdropped my NordVPN password to my wife’s phone while my VPN was on, or is that not what this is discussing? She then cast German Netflix to our TV on AirPlay with the VPN on.
Removing the port is just creating problems without any real benefits.
Like what exactly do we gain from losing Lightning? I seriously don’t get it, besides maybe better waterproofing, but I couldn’t care less about that since I don’t go swimming with my phone and don’t plan on doing so.
I’m confused. Airdrop doesn’t send files over the internet; it establishes an ephemeral peer to peer network to transfer the files. How would this be affected by a VPN?
I believe airdrop works with VPN on. I believe with VPN not all of your traffic is sent over the VPN. Things that can be found locally are still kept local. At least for the iPhone and MacOS (unless you flip the specific option on Mac)
Interesting you have to disable it on both the sending and receiving ends. So far I have to disable VPN on the Mac only just so my phone can send and receive from that computer. The phone’s VPN is always on.
It is true though in what you’re saying. That’s something I have feared since I came across these kind of issues.
So this is not a phone issue, it is a vpn issue. I did some work with setting up a vpn recently and we configured it to block airdrop. So it mite not even be problem, it could be by design.