Apple moved to a new cable for its iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch models a few years ago and other than every single Apple fan tossing all of their own accessories in the trash or purchasing adapters, the company had good reason to upgrade. The main point was speed and that is why the Lightning cable was released. If you have a 30-pin connector on your Apple product you are one in a very small group of people. In the meantime, the Lightning Cable made it back in the news and unfortunately for consumers, the news is not good.
Users have been taking to the web to complain and point out some corrosion that they are finding on the new USB Lightning Cable. This causes the cable to become defective over time and at that point it is completely useless to the user. One user has claimed that his cable and his wife’s cable are both defective and that the gold is corroding after just a few months of use. Once this happens, charging your iPhone or iPad basically becomes impossible. Apple is offering to replace the bad Lightning Cables for free, but some users have reportedly said their claims have been denied by Apple, since it could be marked as water damage.
Water damage is one of the things that will void your warranty with Apple very quickly. According to one user that looked into the issue even further, the corrosion seems to be happening with the Power pin of the cable noting that the “two gold electrodes placed in an aqueous solution with positive voltage on one wire and ground applied to the other will corrode the positive gold electrodes away”. With the cables costing users about $20, the attention on this problem has been quite focused recently.
There are third party retailers that you can get a replacement cable from, but make sure you are buying from a trusted source because others have been known to be selling fake Lightning cables. Apple had millions of uses upgraded from the 30-pin connector to the Lightning cable a few years ago, while at the same time making just about anything you connected to your device completely useless with the new cable. The new cable caused a stir to begin with, but shortly became something that Apple fans just dealt with.
March 10, 2014 at 2:49 pm
The biggest misstep, I think, was not giving a really good answer for why, if they were switching, they didn’t go to a micro-USB connector like the rest of the industry.
March 10, 2014 at 3:25 pm
Gold cannot corrode in a solution of pure water. Most likely the gold is electroplated over another base metal like nickel and copper. The big “duh” question is why are people putting the cable into water? Do they do that with all the other electronic items they use?