By Sean Pratt

The year is 2123. Humanity is in ruins, everything has turned to sand after the “super duper big bombs” dropped in the great war of 2100 between The Resistance and the Defenders. Still, the great question is still being muttered by scavengers all around the world, this question you ask? Why it’s none other than the classic “Hey man, do you have an iPhone charger I could borrow?” This, thankfully, is not a prediction of what will happen 100 years from now. How could I tell? As of the Apple keynote of September 12th, the iPhone charger is no more, as Apple has announced the switch from the lightning port to the USB-C port for charging. Which is not only a big deal for the iPhone, but also for technology as a whole. Also, there’s no way there are actually gonna be factions 100 years from now lame enough to name themselves “The Resistance” and “The Defenders.” I’d like to give a hand to my Snapchat AI for that one.

To answer the question in the title, yes. This is a big deal and you should care about it, and here is why.

It’s faster.

The USB-C cable was first introduced in 2014, but it didn’t hit phones until 2015. The Chinese company LeMobile was the first to add this 18 watt fast charging technology to a phone, the phone failed commercially but it was still cool. The new charging cable hadn’t hit the States until the Google Chromebook Pixel in 2015. The cable had shook consumers around the world with a data transfer speed going from 480 mbps (Megabytes per second) to 10000 mbps. But odds are you’ll be using a cable to charge more often than you are to transfer data, and oh boy can it ever charge. Ever since the iPhone 12, Apple has stopped giving their patented lightning charging cable away with a purchase of a brand new phone, but instead, switched to something faster. A USB-C to lightning adapter, so you could plug your phone with the power of a USB-C cable, and yet still get that classic lightning port. This made it the fastest charging iPhone to its date and was the most groundbreaking thing to happen to the iPhone since the ability to trade it in and get an android instead.

It’s more convenient.

As previously mentioned, the USB-C cable was normalized by 2015 and quickly became the standard cable that all the major manufacturers put into their devices, except Apple (sorta.) Around the same time of the previously mentioned Chromebook Pixel, the newest Macbook Air had also introduced the USB-C cable for charging. This change had devastated Apple fanboys all across the internet. The previous charger had been what Apple had called their MagSafe charger, which was, and still is, admittedly a stroke of genius. The MagSafe charger was magnetized (hence the name, crazy right) so if one were to trip over the cord, it would detach from the laptop without the laptop falling down with it. The removal of this MagSafe technology had sparked outrage as it was convenient, which is Apple’s main goal when making new devices. This is where I’d like to introduce convenience into the picture: The “Apple Ecosystem.” 

The reason Apple has such a devoted fanbase is because all of their devices work seamlessly, having your AirPods switch between your phone and your laptop at the click of a button, replying to text messages and answering facetimes given to your phone from your laptop. It’s all perfect. The one piece of the puzzle that is missing for peak cohesion, is the charging cable. The Macbooks have been using this cable since 2015 and the iPads in ‘18, so why not the phones? This problem is now solved as all 4 devices (including the new Airpods Pro) are now using the same cable. As well as the same cable as every android phone, and the same cable as your chromebook. 

I hope Apple (or the European Union since they are the ones to blame for this) have tempered your fears of a phone charger related war starting in the next hundred years. It has been a very serious topic and I along with everyone in my neighborhood has been stocking up on rations for this one. I think I can find it in my heart to forgive them for this one and I think you should too. This is big, and not just for Apple’s marketing team. A transition like this could possibly be a sign of something more significant. Perhaps more of a connectedness between Androids and iPhone? As the lifelong console wars between Xbox and Playstation seem to be coming to an end, phones could be next in the unification of technology.