It’s a pretty good-size closet.
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Check Goodwill baby!!
Screw Amazon.
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They should be using at least one of those jacks.
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3 cable types in 16 years. Don’t get me wrong, I’m Team Firewire all the way, but that doesn’t seem that excessive.
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Maybe he meant he burned an hour looking around the house/office/toolshed/aquarium for one and then finally found one in seconds on Amazon for less than the cost of the time looking around for an hour.
It’s 2018, and we still need cables for this.
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In my house it is clear that charging cables mate with one member of a pair of socks to spawn ridiculously fragile plastic coat hangers.
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#Thriftshop is the way to go, I get those cords whenever I see them for $0.50, my 4S is still my everyday work phone and my old 4S is now a dashcam and the iPad 1st Gen I won in a contest when they first came out I still use everyday, and my daughter uses her Gen2 iPad everyday ($30 nib on craigslist) etc. Apple stuff works! Why upgrade?
The magic keywords you want are “mfi 30 pin”. The mfi program was designed specifically so that you can tell if a cable is likely to work well.
I’ve had really good luck browsing the Goodwill Outlet store, or “the bins” for short. Electronics is $. 70 per pound where I go, and I’ve just found my third ipod, already loaded up with someone else’s music!
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Everyone needs a FreeGeek in their town. Not like there isn’t enough electronica to recycle… https://freegeek.org
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“I just burnt an hour looking for an old-style iPhone/iPad/iPod cable”
A likely story.
Let’s have a look at your browser history.
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The cable is not a problem. It’s the message “device not supported” because Apple screwed with the USB standard and $APPLE_PRODUCT will only charge from an Apple PSU.
Now there’s an idea! Must be an app for that. I will have a look.
And still the connector of choice for hotel room audio docks. Grr.
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There is rather a lot more than USB going on in there.
USB, FireWire (not spoken by many of the later models; but I believe still a valid charge source until the end), some analog audio and video, power supply for peripherals, some serial for keyboards and other low-speed accessories, etc.
The move to the lower pin count cable required killing a lot of directly accessible I/O, with accessories adding those features to compensate.
Perhaps the most dramatic example are the new video-out cables. Since the connector doesn’t have pins or bandwidth for HDMI the cable has a SoC in it that boots a teeny little kernel when plugged in, listens for a compressed video stream over USB and handles HDMI output. That’s why the hardwired video out has similar compression artifacts to an airplay stream; and why some of the older, weaker, devices only supported video out at lower resolutions than they supported internally; because they couldn’t compress the higher ones in real time.
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Makes sense, although I don’t recall much if any hardware that actually made use of all those pins, especially in the pre-video models.
I don’t think that there was too much that used all of it(and Apple was less than entirely consistent about the behavior of all pins with all devices over the life of the connector, so some of the pins were, if you cared about broad compatibility, something you had to treat as reserved or deprecated at various times); but, aside from low speed, general purpose, Apple Accessory Protocol serial chatter which could be a wide variety of different things to different people, the 30 pin connector had very limited pin re-use/reassignment; so if any accessories used it it is probably in the pinout; even if there isn’t a case where an accessory used two distinct functions at the same time.
If they had wanted to go in this direction I imagine that the ability to act as a USB master could have been exploited for maximum versatility per pin; but I don’t remember Apple being too interested: there was the digital camera focused adapter; but little broader exploitation of ‘generic high speed protocol’ until lightening; which tossed everything but that and power.
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I’m pretty happy that Apple deprecated it… I can pick up a device (like a clock or audio dock) that was originally very very costly for a couple of bucks, and then pop a $12 bluetooth widget on the 30-pin connector.
My big audio center was built with a port for a ipod dock that cost $350. I bought one years later on Ebay for $10. Now it has bluetooth!
Smart! Does a “very very costly” dock come with a premium DAC or something?
Sure does! But the bluetooth interface on your phone or tablet or whatever won’t help your music any. 
It’s a cheap way to get the (admittedly problematic) bluetooth capability in a very nice, but older audio system. Much more cost effective than buying a new amp with built-in bluetooth!
