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conversationtreepress.com - beautifully designed, letterpress-printed, finely bound booksBy Dan Moren for Macworld
The USB-C iPhone won’t clean up Apple’s Lightning mess
It’s time for everyone’s favorite development in the world of Apple tech: a port change. Yep, that’s right. After what will have been about 11 years, the iPhone is once again changing its charging port, this time from Lightning to the increasingly ubiquitous USB-C. (For comparison sake, the previous 30-pin dock connector, lasted just nine years, from the third-generation iPod to the iPhone 5.)
We all know the benefits that the USB-C transition will bring: interoperability, less cable waste, and improvements in speed. But it’ll also cause some pain for those who have scads of Lightning cables lying around that will be, if not useless, then at superfluous.
However, even with the big change that is the iPhone’s charging port, Lightning won’t be excised from across Apple’s line-up. There are several other products that will still need to make the transition before there can truly be one port to rule them all. Here’s a rundown of what’s still using Lightning and when they might embrace the USB-C future.