In 2012, Apple killed the relatively bulky 30-pin connector on iPhones to switch to Lightning, a slimmer and faster charging technology, which rendered many speakers and chargers obsolete. This transition feels like a bit of déjà vu. Apple is making a change to the iPhones charging port, and the iPhone 15 is the first to feature USB-C instead of Lightning. They will have to replace those with new products that use USB-C connectors to plug into the new iPhones. This all means that when Apple customers buy their next iPhones, they will no longer be able to plug in all the Lightning accessories they have collected, such as charging cables, speaker docks and earbuds. In its place will be a different oval-shaped connector: USB-C.įor the average tech user, change isn’t fun. To comply with recent European regulations, the iPhone 15, unveiled Tuesday, will abandon the Lightning connector that has been the method for charging iPhones for 11 years. Eventually, however, we’ll breathe a sigh of relief.Īllow me to unpack that. But Lightning still earns fond memories for the engineering put into its design.The iPhone 15 (technically, the 17th iteration of the iconic Apple phone) has arrived with a big change that is sure to annoy many of us. Put that connector in the shredder and scatter the fragments. Without it, we might already have an iPhone that can charge in a half-hour. The Lightning connector has been holding iPhones back for years. (Apart from the iPhone SE – and the iPhone SE 2020’s battery life is still bad.) IPhones have charging from 2014, and the only reason we’re not more angry about it is because we’re still high off the relief iPhones no longer have terrible battery life. Its Xiaomi Mi 10 Ultra has 120W charging, which Xiaomi claims charges the phone in 23 minutes. Xiaomi’s Poco X3 NFC has a 33W charger – and that costs under £200. The iPhone 11 Pro Max charger gets you 18W, and this can rise to a shade over 20W if you use a more powerful adapter. The real part that holds Lightning back in 2020, and why it has to go, is power transmission.Īpple has never released the details on the ceiling of Lightning’s power, how many watts it can send to a phone’s battery. The power principleīut now it’s 2020 and we’ve lost the wired headphone argument. Those little dongles have their own DAC, a digital to analogue converter chip. And yet when you turned it over it would be, through some kind of 2012-era David Blaine magic trick, still the wrong way around. microUSB is sure to be remembered, above all else, for those moments at 2am when you tried to plug your phone in only to find it was the wrong way around. It’s smaller than its USB-C replacement, and introduced us to two important standards we now take for granted.īack in 2012, for most the Lightning was the cable you didn’t have to worry about plugging in the wrong way around. With that in mind, you have to conclude Lightning has aged pretty well. Those were the days when Androids still used micro SIMs, not nano-size ones, and a phone was considered big if it had a 4.5-inch screen. It was introduced on the iPhone 5, iPad Mini and 4th Gen “big” iPad. We first met the Apple Lightning connector in September 2012. If you think Apple’s bad with its proprietary walled gardens, take a look at Sony’s past. So now is as good a time as any to look back and ask: was Lightning a proprietary gem like Sony MiniDisc or opportunistic trash like Sony MemoryStick? The iPad Air’s switch to USB-C marks the end for Lightning, and all but confirms the new iPhones due in October will have a USB-C port. That last product retains the Lightning connector, but only because it's based off the same system architecture used in 2018’s iPhone XS.
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