
When that happens, iPhone owners are of course on the hook to buy new ones. You don’t have to be an electrical engineer to understand that plugging in a cable with visible wiring is not a great idea.

ANKER LIGHTNING CABLE PATCH
The crack gradually widens, a gyre that electrical tape can patch over for only so long. It starts as a small break, or maybe even just a crease, in the cord. In fact, fragility is the result of how the Lightning cord is designed, Kyle Wiens, the CEO of the repair group iFixit, told me: “They’re just going for as thin as possible.” That means a sleek strain-relief gasket at the head of the cord rather than something more robust, and plastic that ditches the environmentally unfriendly but sturdier PVC material you can find on cords that don’t break quite so easily. The Lightning connector lived up to Apple’s reputation for beautiful products-at least until the rubber started to tatter, exposing the wires. The switch might feel annoying, resulting in another cord destined for that overstuffed cardboard box where your clunky OG iPod connector and various A/V hookups went to die. Instead, going forward, all iPhones will use USB-C, the same cord now used by MacBooks, Kindles, Chromebooks, phones, and most other devices. These days, a perfectly reasonable approach to a new iPhone announcement is to ignore it altogether, but the latest model, which Apple unveiled today, has more than a slightly better camera: It finally-finally!-kills the Lightning charger port once and for all. And in some cases it even just decides to stop working even though there’s no wire damage.”) (One representative comment from 2016: “Probably the worst charging cable I have ever used. Back when the Apple Store website let customers leave reviews, the Lightning cable notched a whopping average of 1.5 stars out of five.

There goes another $19 straight to the world’s most valuable company, and another scrap for the e-waste junkyard. The proprietary cords that power the world’s billion-plus iPhones turn into a fraying mess before they stop working altogether. The iPhone cord is the latter.įor more than a decade, Apple’s Lightning cable has been something like the avocado of consumer electronics: wildly expensive relative to its shelf life. Others are foisted on you by corporations hell-bent on leveraging their market power for financial gain.

Some annoyances in life are unavoidable: the creak in your knees as you age, the tax code, Pete Davidson.
