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Oh Lightning cable, how I hate you so

Several years ago, my wife and I retired our Blackberries for iPhone 4S. The heavens parted, a chorus sang Halleluiah, and we were inducted into the Apple cult.
Brian Zinchuk

Several years ago, my wife and I retired our Blackberries for iPhone 4S. The heavens parted, a chorus sang Halleluiah, and we were inducted into the Apple cult.

Having been so inducted, we dove into the Apple ecosystem – iTunes music, digital movie copies, the works. The home theatre system (which happened to die a few weeks ago) had a dock on the front that allowed us to play music through the proprietary Apple 30-pin connection on the bottom of the phone. Each of our alarm clocks had docks as well, to both charge the phone and work as a mini boom box.

I discovered recently you could date a hotel’s most recent renovation by its alarm clocks. We stayed in a Regina hotel equipped with alarm clocks that had 30-pin docks on the top, meaning they were at least five or six years old.

You don’t see docks much these days. It turns out someone realized iPhones, for all their glory, are rather fragile. I realized this right away, and never has a day gone by where each of our phones was not protected by an Otterbox Defender case. Every person I knew over the years (and, for some reason, primarily women) who did not have a Defender case had a cracked screen in short order. Ours have survived.

But the layer of armour meant the phone would not fit on a dock, either for the home theatre or radio, and that was the end of that.

Towards the end of their operational lifespan, Apple made the phones start to do something funny. Inexpensive gas station charging cords, that worked perfectly fine, suddenly stopped working. The phones rejected them, like a spurned lover. You were good enough for me once, by I’ve raised my standards, damn you cheap cord! Away with you!

We used those phones extensively for four years before they got to the point where their batteries simply wouldn’t hold a charge. We broke down and bought two iPhone 6S, each with the proprietary Apple Lightning cable. Along the way, the phone family became equipped with iPad minis, also charged by Lightning cables.

The Lightning cable used a much smaller port. And it also meant all our dock devices were now useless for that function. I ended up getting a new alarm clock after the old one died. This one came with a new Lighting dock, but it, too, would not work with a phone swaddled in thick Otterbox rubber and plastic. But it did have a USB port which would allow me to use a charging cable.

In addition to the cable that came with the phone, it’s always good to have extras, like one for each vehicle. So I bought a yellow one. I think my wife had a red one. They worked, for a while. Then one day, each of these cables stopped working. Unplugging it, flipping it over, and re-inserting it sometimes worked. But eventually, no dice.

One day I was in Yorkton in that paper-affixing store, and I said I was frustrated with these cables not working, so they sold me a new one. Apple-certified, they told me. It was about $30. It worked for a few weeks. Then it stopped working. So much for certified.

When we bought the 6S models, we each got a charging kit which consisted of a higher amperage car charger, a large charging brick, a backup battery and a braided, Apple-certified Lightning cable. These kits were each around $80. They worked fine, for about a year. Then the braided cable stopped working for me on a consistent basis. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

This has pushed me to buy only authentic Apple cables, as these others failed, wore out or got lost. Surely these would not fail. Until they do.

Now, even my 100 per cent, genuine, Steve Jobs lovin’ Apple cables are giving me the same treatment, just as our batteries are starting to seriously show their age. I am about to lose my mind and start swinging a hammer.

The rumours are the next iteration of the iPhone will use the USB-C cable, which, shockingly, is not an Apple proprietary device. They’ve adopted these on their MacBook laptops, so I am hoping they will do the same on their iPhones. Will this end the insanity?

One can only hope we don’t get struck by Lightning in the meantime.

— Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at brian.zinchuk@sasktel.net.