So the iPhone 15 lineup shipped this past Friday, the 22nd, and I want to talk about something that isn't the camera or the Dynamic Island or any of that, I want to talk about my cable drawer.
I have been sitting on this blog since November 2011. Lightning didn't even exist yet when I started this thing, Apple didn't announce it until the iPhone 5 event in September 2012, a full year after my first post here. So Lightning and this blog have basically lived the same life, and now Lightning is dead, at least going forward, and I have a drawer in my kitchen that is essentially a small museum of a cable format that no longer matters.
I counted last night while procrastinating on actual work. Eleven Lightning cables. Not exaggerating. Some came in the box with phones I don't even own anymore. Some are the braided ones from Anker that I bought in a panic during a road trip when my stock cable frayed at the connector (this always happens at the connector, never in the middle, I don't know why). Two are unmarked white cables I genuinely cannot account for. There's a car charger adapter, a Lightning-to-3.5mm dongle I bought the week Apple killed the headphone jack and have used maybe four times total, and a battery case that is now, as of Friday, a fairly expensive paperweight.
The iPhone 15 and 15 Pro both moved to USB-C. This isn't news to anyone who's been paying even glancing attention, it's been rumored and then confirmed for the better part of a year, partly because the EU basically forced Apple's hand with its common-charger rule that kicks in for new devices by the end of 2024. Apple could see the writing on the wall and decided to get ahead of it rather than get dragged. Fine. Smart, even. But I want to register my complaint anyway, which is: it took eleven years. Android phones have been on USB-C since like 2015. I switched my laptop, my iPad, my headphones, my portable battery, basically everything else in my life to USB-C years ago, and I kept a separate cable in my bag just for the phone like some kind of idiot. That's not a design decision, that's a tax.
And even now it's not clean. The base iPhone 15 gets USB-C but it's stuck at USB 2.0 speeds, same as Lightning always was, basically nothing. If you want the fast transfer speeds, up to 10Gbps, you need the Pro or Pro Max, which start at $999. So the "upgrade" is really a Pro-tier feature dressed up as a universal one, and the $799 base model gets the connector shape without the actual benefit of the connector. I don't think that's an accident. I think that's Apple deciding people will pay extra for USB-C to actually mean something, which, credit where it's due, is a very Apple move.
I preordered a Pro on the 15th and it showed up Friday afternoon, and the first thing I did, before setting it up, before restoring from backup, was plug it into the same USB-C cable I already use for my MacBook charger. It just worked. No dongle, no drawer-diving, no "wait, which cable is this." It's such a small thing and it felt disproportionately good, honestly, in the way that only mildly inconveniencing yourself for a decade and then suddenly not having to anymore can feel.
I'm not going to throw the Lightning cables out yet. I know myself, I'll need one eventually for some peripheral I forgot exists, and then I'll be glad I kept the drawer. But I did finally coil them all together with a twist tie and shove them to the back, behind the good cables, which is basically a demotion and feels appropriate.
One other small thing from this same week worth a mention: OpenAI put out a post on Monday saying ChatGPT is getting voice and image input, rolling out to Plus and Enterprise users over the next couple weeks. Haven't gotten it myself yet. Curious how the voice mode actually sounds in practice versus how it reads in a blog post, which is usually where these things fall apart.
Anyway. Eleven cables, one drawer, one very overdue connector change. Small stuff, but it's the small stuff that actually changes your day-to-day, not the marketing copy about titanium.