Apple Now Shipping Lightning To 30-Pin Adapters 173
hcs_$reboot writes "Apple has started shipping the iPhone 5 Lightning connector to 30-pin adapters. Some iPhone 5 owners complained about its new connector being incompatible with the previously well known 30 pin connectors (iPhone 4S and before, iPod, iPad, and chargers). From the article: 'Apple's accessories page shows the adapter as available to ship in October, while one MacRumors reader said the e-mail notice pointed to a delivery day of October 9.'"
Re:Micro USB? (Score:2, Informative)
The commonly stated reason is that the connector includes stuff like an HDMI interface. Now of course that ignores the fact there exists standards which integrate such things into a micro-usb connector, such as MHL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_High-Definition_Link [wikipedia.org]
So it is part functionality, and part lock-in.
Re:Money Grab? (Score:3, Informative)
If you mean why change the dock adapter in the first place? Well, that's been done to death and it had to happen sometime. The old one still had pins for Firewire data and power - no iOS device has shipped with a firewire controller for almost 5 years!
Wasn't firewire that standard that Apple chose for its machines over USB...and Apple users claimed was better than USB.
No, they never claimed it was "better than USB" nor did they choose it "over USB" - they promoted both ports equally for what they were good at. USB was great for low bandwidth, hot pluggable devices like consumer scanners, printers, mice, card readers etc and Firewire was great for high bandwidth, low latency applications like hard drives, digital video, external sound cards etc. It's why all Macs at the time (and most to this day, less the Air and retina MBP) ship with both USB and Firewire ports side by side.
For those applications it was better than USB (at the time mostly USB 1 speed), but for the other applications like mice, keyboards, printers etc USB was much better. Even when USB was upgraded to 480 Mbs it was still inferior in practice to even the theoretically slower Firewire 400 due to the heavy CPU overhead of the USB protocol.
Removing the controller chip for Firewire from the iPod (and subsequently never including it in the iPhone etc) was purely a cost/benefit ratio - they did it at the same time they launched the iPod on Windows and at the time there was almost no penetration of Firewire on Windows machines so it was cheaper to just leave the controller chip out. You could still charge those early iPods on Firewire - and it was faster, since you could do 18 volts at about 7 watts, way more than USB, but eventually they also took that out of the newer models too. The pins have been wasted ever since, with some models using them for newer protocols but there's always the danger that someone *could* plug in an old Firewire>30 pin dock connector which has a +18V line and data pins, so the device has to be able to handle that and protect itself. Apple knew eventually that they would need to change the connector to something more modern.