Snippet: Pins and Future-Proofing ☇

Rainer Brockerhoff is back (he originally compared micro-USB with Lightning) and shares what he figured out about Lightning’s pin configuration:

I’ll be seriously surprised if even one of those points is not verified when the specs come out. And this is what is meant by “future-proof”. Re-using USB and micro-USB (or any existing standard) could never do any of that.

Update: just saw this article which purports to show the pinouts of the current Lightning-to-USB2 cable. “…dynamically assigns pins to allow for reversible use” is of course obvious, if you put together the “adaptive” and “reversible” points from this picture of the iPhone 5 event. Regarding the pinout they published, it’s not radially symmetrical as I thought it would be (except for one pin), so I really would like a confirmation from some site like iFixit (I hear they’ll do a teardown soon).

I agree with Brockerhoff (if you haven’t checked out his other blog posts, you really ought to)—Apple is betting on this connector taking them for another nine years or so, and this will allow the use of accessories and interfaces we haven’t even dreamed about yet. Furthermore, the design really does complement Thunderbolt.