(1) Grasp the hard plastic jacket, and only the hard plastic jacket, when connecting and disconnecting the Lightning plug. Apple touted the Lightning connector as more durable than the 30-pin Dock Connector it replaced. So here’s what you can do to keep your cables working. Yank on a cable, pull it from both sides, or let it make contact with liquids - very few cables are going to be able to withstand that sort of (ab)use. By comparison, strain and corrosion typically are your fault. If you’re getting a cable for less than that, even if it’s claimed to be an authentic Lightning cable, you can automatically assume that corners were cut when making it, and that you’re taking on a higher risk of a failure that’s not (entirely) your fault. The reasons are a combination of strain, corrosion, and - in some cases, but fewer than one might think - shoddy manufacturing.Īs a general rule, legitimately Apple-authorized Lightning cables don’t sell for less than $8 apart from Amazon’s cables, relatively few are less than $10. One thing I’ve noticed about Lightning cable failures (and reports of Lightning cable failures) is the consistent places where they’re happening: many occur at the junction point between the Lightning plug and the soft plastic cable, some impact the Lightning plug’s pins, and relatively few are at or near the USB port. Taking a few precautions can save you a $10 to $20 replacement cost, as well as wasted time and stress… But there’s a lot of bad information about Lightning cables floating around right now, and having spent a lot of time using them and reading user complaints, I wanted to help people avoid some of their preventable failures.
These complaints aren’t without merit: even Apple-authorized Lightning cables do break, which is particularly infuriating given how expensive they tend to be. The one that works without problems is, amazingly, Apple’s official Lightning cable - the one that has been pilloried by numerous dissatisfied users, notably including our own Zac Hall, for coming apart after months or years of use. It’s not the big Belkin cable on the left, which is visibly pretty wrecked, or the thick, no-name 6-foot cable on the right, which looks fine on the surface but can’t properly supply power to a connected device.
Less than two years after they each went into service, only one of the three Lightning cables pictured above is actually working properly.
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