I’m surprised that nobody makes dirt-cheap ‘lighting’ extension cables. I know that the ‘lighting’ cable itself has various fiddly active components and substantial control by Apple; but I would(naively), imagine that the system wouldn’t know the difference between a direct ‘lightning peripheral -> lightning jack’ connection and a ‘lightning peripheral -> several inches of ‘dumb’ passive extension cable -> lightning jack’ connection, so long as the extension cable passed each pin through transparently and wasn’t too ghastly in terms of signal quality.
I wonder if the connectors are relatively closely guarded as well as the active components?
It has worse issues, e.g. the need for the authentication chip. Chip. For a lousy cable!
Would be oh so easy to do - if not for a proprietary connector and even more proprietary auth chip!
Though for merely an extension to an existing device, a “dumb” adapter could be possibly made from salvaged parts. But then, you have to be able to salvage the parts and have where to get them from.
Apple. Making everything shiny and white and unfriendly to anybody who wants to do more with it than spend money on it.
I’m a little surprised that nobody makes(at least nobody I can find) a microUSB jack specifically designed to be mechanically compatible with a board designed for a miniUSB jack. I know that the bulk of the market must be for small-as-possible stuff, for new designs; but it’d be a relatively modest mechanical tweak, and you’d think that somebody would want them.
There’s an older product along similar lines, a neat little module that FTDI makes, that encapsulates a USB/serial converter in a package of exactly the same shape, size, and pinout of a normal 9-pin RS-232 jack. Not as elegant as actually refreshing the product; but allows you to turn a board designed for a serial connection into a USB device just by swapping a single part, with no modification of traces, dangling daughterboards, or other futzing.
The market is apparently not big enough. Or the product is too obscure for us to know about it.
I’d go another way: a thin circuitboard adapter. Take a piece of 0.2mm copper-clad, etch the patterns, solder microUSB from one side, solder to board from the other. The thin copper-clad is a bitch to source but it is possible to find with some patience.
Well, I thought he’d rant more about how his connector has the apparent sturdiness of a soaked tissue in a thunderstorm. Given how rough I am on connectors, I’d likely order up a dozen of those and expect to order again within a year.
Oh, wait; I’ve all iOS kit that doesn’t care which way you plug it in! Folks snarking about the over-pricing of such fail to consider the value of their own time and aggravation.
Or just learn to have some feeling in the fingers, get used to not ram things where they don’t want to go smoothly (this will save you an awful lot of time and aggravation on its own as you won’t break things - not just connectors - so often), and use a high-contrast marker to mark the “top” sides.
I did not break a single microUSB connector so far. I believe you can learn that skill too, it is not so difficult.
If the time needed to make the money for the Apple Tax is also factored in (calculate it not by wage-hour but after subtracting the cost of living from the wage, then divide the difference by the hours worked, tells you more), plus the time and aggravation spent on fighting various restrictive walled-garden Appleisms once you run into them (including but by far not limited to the moving target of rooting the stuff to get it under your own control), Apple with all its sugary crap becomes a sucker’s choice.
I have a bag full of solder-on micro-USBs I got from Amazon. But whenever possible I convert to full-size USB type A instead.
The Universal Serial Bus is a great thing, but the connectors suck, and the most sucky of them all is the micro-USB. It’s a city-folk connector designed for apartment-dwelling 20-somethings by yuppies working under banks of florescent lights. It’s so stupidly small it can get grains of salt wedged in it. Any connector that small should be round and unpolarized, dammit.
Well, different people have different lifestyle priorities; it’s a matter of how you want to focus your energies, how you want to live your life. I have a ruggedized pocket watch because I have never found a wristwatch that can survive on my arm. I don’t purposely smash them, I just go to check the time and there’s a metal ring with some gears and shattered crystal hanging out of it strapped to my wrist. I could probably train myself to protect a wristwatch but it’s not a high enough priority for me… and besides, I have a pocketwatch.
Of course this all has to do with mobile phones. The alternative to micro USB was historically a whole bunch of mutuall antagonistic incompatible connectors, and the one they standardized on was a real turkey. All except Apple. To be an android fanboy is to support microUSB. To be an Apple fanboy is to appreciate lightning. And then there’s miniUSB cables sneaking away into your bag. My trackpad wants one thing, my kindle another, and somehow my bluetooth keyboard needs the one cable i haven’t packed.
Me, I use 30 pin. Used to like it until I realized that
My case only supports connectors that are thin enough.
Loose connections are possible, even with the magnet. Charging “overnight” with a loose cable is aggravating in the moning.
Do you want to use the industry standard, or would you rather use something intelligent?
They could have used something better. We are stuck with it and it is the least bad choice available. The easy availability and ease of working with is a significant plus. That it needs some care when using, that it is not exactly MILSPEC “und soldatenfest”, is a definite minus.
But the alternative is ending up stuck with an office colleague’s charger with an incompatible connector.
The One Special Snowflake. If the EU was good for something, they’d force Apple to use a standard charging connector.
Not necessarily. MicroUSB is what we are stuck with. Its chief value is that it is everywhere.
Apple fanboys will appreciate anything The Fruit drops on them.
That’s why I mod my stuff to microUSB. I made myself a batch of breakout boards for the connectors. I have to redo them with thinner circuitboard material.
The Lightning won’t protect you from chewed cables. The Apple power bricks are known for cable wear at the end of the strain relief; I had to repair a number. OF COURSE the Fruit, in its infinite wisdom, ultrasound-welded the case shut, instead of using standard Philips screws (Nokia, why that three-pronged crap?) to hold it together, so I had to use a hot knife to cut it open to get inside, and then hot-glue the case shut again.
Given the benefits of compatibility, I’ll go for industry standard any day.
Lightning would be an acceptable choice, if the connector is easy to buy at the nearest parts store, including user-configurable chip that is built in, for cost not higher than twice the microUSB one.
The European Standardisation Bodies CEN, CENELEC and ETSI (independent of the OMTP/GSMA proposal) defined a common External Power Supply (EPS) for use with smartphones sold in the EU based on micro-USB.[67] 14 of the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturers signed the EU’s common EPS Memorandum of Understanding (MoU).[68][69] Apple Inc., one of the original MoU signers, makes micro-USB adapters available – as permitted in the Common EPS MoU – for its iPhones equipped with Apple’s proprietary 30 pin dock connector or (later) “Lightning” connector.[70][71]
The newer micro-USB receptacles are designed for up to 10,000 cycles of
insertion and removal between the receptacle and plug, compared to 1,500
for the standard USB and 5,000 for the mini-USB receptacle.
USB 3.0 micro type-B is awful. I’m looking forward to type-C.
I love such drop-in retrofits.
But whenever possible I convert to full-size USB type A instead.