How many wires do you usually bring when going out? If you are an Android user, you can bring a cable and a charging head to meet the charging needs of various 2021 digital devices such as laptops, phones, cameras, headphones, etc. But if you are an iPhone user, you must bring an additional lighting data cable.

Since Apple replaced the lighting interface on iPhone 5, it has been more than a decade since Apple replaced the iPhone data interface. Even the iPad and MacBook series have all replaced the type-c interface.

Meanwhile, industry analyst Guo Mingyi from Tianfeng International stated in a recent report that Apple will retain the Lightning connector on the iPhone for the "foreseeable future" and has no intention of switching to type-c. Why hasn't Apple changed its iPhone interface since 2021?

Lightning is a standard customized by Apple, with built-in MFI certified chips. Only chips that have passed MFI certification can be used normally on the iPhone. If third-party manufacturers want to produce usable data cables, they must pass MFI certification and pay patent certification fees to Apple. The type-c interface is an open and universal standard, and third-party manufacturers can produce type-c data cables without paying any fees.

You can buy a Type-C data cable at will, and it's less than 10 yuan for wallet shipping, but a legitimate MFi certified lighting cable is very expensive, and accessories are also a big part of Apple's revenue.

In 2012, Apple officially released the lighting interface and installed it on the iPhone 5 of that year, which also gave users the first experience of plugging and unplugging power cords in and out. Since then, the lighting interface has become standard on iPhone models, while Android models that support the type-c interface only appeared in 2014 two years later and became popular in 2015.　　

There are still a large number of iPhone 6 and iPad 3 or older users, and if the interface is blindly changed, it will cause incompatibility with the old device. Once type-c is used, billions of lighting accessories will be eliminated. This is very environmentally unfriendly for Apple, after all, they don't even give away charging heads now.

Apple believes that the waterproof performance and safety of the type-c interface are indeed lower than those of Lightning and MagSafe wireless charging technology. Admittedly, type-C is flexible and open, which is also a double-edged sword. Once encountering hacker attacks, the scope of influence will be very wide, which is clearly unacceptable to Apple.

Overall, the benefits of Apple choosing to continue with the lighting interface are much higher than transitioning to the type-c interface, and the Apple ecosystem is already very well-established. Using the lighting interface internally will not encounter any problems, and the main inconvenience will mostly come from external sources.

From the perspective of the company's future plans, the iPhone series will still coexist with the lighting interface for a period of time, and Apple has shown its ambition to skip type-c and directly enter the era of no interface. But at present, it still takes a few years, and as for the future, let's wait and see.

Source: Zhiyoubang Technology