So Apple had its big event yesterday (the 12th) and yeah, iPhone 5 is real now: thinner, taller screen, LTE, all the stuff that had already leaked about nine times over the summer so none of it was exactly a shock. Pre-orders start Friday, phone ships the 21st. I'm not going to sit here and rehash the spec sheet, you can get that from literally every other tech site this week. What's stuck in my head since watching the keynote stream at my desk yesterday afternoon is the connector.
They killed the 30-pin dock connector. After nine years. Every iPod since 2003 has used that same fat little plug, and now it's gone, replaced by this tiny reversible thing they're calling Lightning. And look, I get why. It's smaller, it's supposedly more durable, it lets them shave a few millimeters off the bottom of the phone. Fine. But I sat there doing math in my head about how many 30-pin cables and docks I personally own and I stopped counting somewhere around eight.
There's the one in my car that I paid $70 for at a Best Buy in like 2009 so I could plug my iPhone into the stereo. There's the alarm clock dock on my nightstand, a Griffin thing my sister got me for Christmas two years ago, that I use every single night. Two more cables at my desk. A dock connector cable in my laptop bag. My old iPod, the one from college that still works fine and lives in a drawer, uses the same plug too, so at least that stuff is cross compatible with itself. Was. Past tense now, I guess.
Apple's selling an adapter so old accessories still sort of work — $29 for the basic one, $39 if you want it with a cable attached instead of just the little dongle. That's real money for what's basically a permission slip to keep using stuff you already paid for. And from what I've read the adapter doesn't even pass video out, so if you've got one of those docks with video output for photos or whatever, that's just done, no adapter fixes it.
I'm not saying they should've kept the old connector forever. Nothing lasts forever, ports get old, USB-A is going to look ancient in ten years too probably. But there's something about watching a company that's this big just casually obsolete an entire industry of accessories overnight that bugs me. Somewhere there's a guy who runs a small business making iPhone docks and speaker systems and he's probably had a rough week. Multiply that by however many companies build stuff around the 30-pin plug and it's a lot of inventory that's suddenly a lot less valuable.
The EarPods thing is smaller but also kind of funny to me — they redesigned the earbuds too, new shape, supposedly fits ears better than the old ones that famously fell out of everyone's ears if you so much as jogged in place. I've had the same complaint about stock Apple earbuds since I got my first iPod nano, so if they actually fixed that I'll be mildly impressed. Twenty-nine bucks to buy a pair separately though, which feels steep for earbuds you can lose behind a couch cushion in about four days, based on my personal track record.
Anyway. I'm still getting the phone, I already know that about myself, I've been in this ecosystem since 2008 and I'm not jumping ship over a connector. But I'm going to be annoyed every single day for a while when I go to plug into the car and remember I need a dongle for it now. Ordering two of the adapters tonight, one for the car and one to keep at my desk, because knowing me I'll lose the first one within a month and then be stuck fumbling with a USB cable in the driveway like an idiot.
If you've got a garage full of old iPod accessories from the last decade, this is probably the week to start thinking about what you actually still use versus what's just been sitting there out of habit. I found a 30-pin FM transmitter in a box under my desk while writing this that I genuinely forgot I owned.