They Can’t All Be Lightning Cables

Micro USB Cable with Detached Port

One of the non-Apple devices that I own had the innards of its Micro USB port literally ripped out by the cable, a result of not particularly heavy usage. That’s never happened to me with an Apple device—even with the old, unlovely 30-pin dock connector. I’ve always found Micro USB to be cheap feeling—no matter how nice a device is, as soon as I spot a Micro USB port, it seems somehow less appealing—but this incident drove home for me how disappointingly fragile the whole specification is too. And yet most portable devices these days rely on it; even if you tried, it would be difficult to avoid Micro USB. I suppose Apple has good reasons for holding the Lightning spec close, but I sure wish I could just use Lightning cables everywhere instead.

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