Flashback: saying goodbye to the Lightning port

17 September 2023

This week we bid farewell to the Lightning port – with the launch of the iPhone 15 series and the Pro models its story comes to a close. We have already had a detailed look at Lightning, what it was, what it could do and what it couldn’t do. Here we just wanted to remember all the devices that were powered by Lightning.

The story began in 2012 with the iPhone 5, the iPad 4 and the brand new iPad mini. Apple also switched a couple of iPods – the 7th gen nano and the 5th gen touch – to Lightning. This was significant as the 30-pin connector that Lightning came to replace was originally used on the iPod (after ditching FireWire).

Now, the iPhone 5, like the iPads and the iPods, each had 3.5mm headphone jack – that wouldn’t go away until the iPhone 7 generation. But you can see that the writing was on the wall, Apple also introduced a version of its wired EarPods headphones that used a Lightning plug instead of a 3.5mm jack.

A quick note: to avoid clutter, we will skip some products, mostly cables and chargers and such. Really the only such accessory worth including here is the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter from 2016 – Apple included one of these with every iPhone 7 (along with a pair of Lightning EarPods) and it did the same for future models until 2018.

So, as you can see the list is dominated by iDevices, but there are wireless headphones – the AirPods, which are moving to USB-C as well – plus small battery-powered electronics like some keyboards and mice (those should have switched to USB-C along with the Macs that they are connected to, anyway).

Goodbye, Lightning.

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022