So the Wonderlust invite showed up in my inbox Tuesday morning, that swirly gradient Apple logo thing, "See you September 12" in that thin apple font they always use. My first thought wasn't even about the phone. It was: here we go again with the cables.
You've probably already seen it if you follow any of this stuff. Apple's holding their event at Apple Park on the 12th, presumably to show off the iPhone 15 lineup, and the rumor mill (Gurman's been saying this for months now over at Bloomberg) is pretty convinced this is finally the year Lightning dies and USB-C takes over. Nothing's confirmed as of me typing this, obviously, Apple hasn't said a word about ports or anything else. But between the EU's new law requiring USB-C on phones sold there by the end of next year and basically every leaker pointing the same direction, it'd be a genuine surprise at this point if they didn't switch.
And look, I'm not going to pretend this is some huge shock. It's been telegraphed for a year. But it did send me digging through the drawer in my desk where I keep, no exaggeration, at least nine Lightning cables in various states of fraying, plus two 30-pin dock connectors I apparently still can't bring myself to throw out. This blog's been running since November 2011, which means I started writing this thing on an iPhone 4S with the old 30-pin connector, and Lightning didn't even exist yet, it showed up with the iPhone 5 about a year later. So functionally I have now lived through, or am about to live through, three different Apple charging ports on this blog's watch. That's a weird thing to realize before your first coffee.
The annoying part isn't the phone itself, it's everything around the phone. Every case with an integrated Lightning cable, every car mount, every battery pack, every random cheap cable you bought in an airport because you forgot your good one at home. All of that becomes clutter overnight. I still have a box of 30-pin stuff from 2012 sitting in a closet that I have never once opened since Lightning came out, and I fully expect to do the exact same thing with Lightning cables in about a year. Nobody throws this stuff away, they just start a new drawer.
On the other hand (and I promise this is the only concession I'm making here), I already own a pile of USB-C cables for my MacBook and my noise-cancelling headphones and basically everything else in my life that isn't an iPhone. So if this actually happens, my life gets simpler, not harder. One cable, every device, finally. That's the pitch, and it's a good one. I just resent that it took a European regulation to make it happen rather than, you know, Apple deciding cable fragmentation was dumb on its own.
A smaller, dumber complaint
While I'm on the subject of cables: can we talk about how none of them are labeled? I have a drawer with probably fifteen cables in it and I could not tell you which ones are USB-C to USB-C, which are USB-C to Lightning, which are the slow charge-only kind versus the ones that actually do data transfer. They all look identical. Every single time I need to transfer photos off my phone I end up testing three cables before I find one that actually works for data and not just trickle charging. This is a solved problem in literally every other category of household object and yet here we are.
Anyway. September 12th, mark it if you care, we'll know soon enough whether the rumors held up. I'm not going to sit here and predict pricing or camera specs because half of what gets guessed before these events turns out wrong anyway, and I'd rather just wait two weeks and see the actual thing. What I will say is that if USB-C really is coming to iPhone, it's the first port change in over a decade, and it's going to make a lot of drawers in a lot of houses briefly, uselessly obsolete. Mine included. I'm keeping the cables anyway. I always do.