Replacement Lightning Cable Discovery

I'm guessing a bunch of us have experienced the less than perfect durability of Apple's Lightning cables...and eventually we need to purchase replacements. I have a few non-Apple replacement Lightning cables I purchased a while ago...and have been using them for charging my iPhone...and they worked well. As can be hopefully seen in the photo...the replacement Lightning cable on the left has a thicker cable & a beefier "nub" on the end for grasping the cable end for insertion & removal.

Recently I upgraded to a newer iPhone (of course needed to migrate everything from the older to newer iPhone)...and discovered something with the "better" replacement cables. I was running into error after error doing the migration (the migration wouldn't complete). After about 2-3 attempts I decided to use an original Apple Lightning cable...and the migration went fine the first time!

When I first received the non-Apple replacement cables I noticed that one pin was missing from the Lightning end of the cable...but figured at the time maybe the missing pin was not needed. The conclusion I've now come to is...these beefier non-Apple replacement cables are fine for syncing & charging (what we do most of the time)...but maybe not so good for doing migrations (maybe that missing pin is used for something during migrations ater all that's not normally used during syncing or charging).

Maybe something to watch out for or be aware of when purchasing non-Apple replacement Lightning cables.



Replacement Lightning cable on left...Apple Lightning cable on right.

- Nick

Nick - I've bought a LOT of lightning cables (and thrown a bunch away for various reasons) over the years (many were non-Apple) but never saw one w/ a missing pin - believe Apple had used a 'verification pin' to prevent third parties from duplicating the cable (no longer true) - but was curious and looked at the 'pin assignments' - shown in the image below (Source) - your 'missing pin' is 2 or 7 since the adapter is reversible - not sure if the coding helps at all?

But for the holidays I replaced my 4+ y/o iPad Air 2 w/ the newest 11" iPad Pro w/ the USB-C charging port - never was a fan of the flimsy lightning adapter and like this more robust port (of course, IMO) - Dave
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I bought a shorter watch charging cable and found out in the morning my watch was only charged to about 80%. I put it back on the original longer genuine apple charger and it quickly was at a full charge. I sent the shorter cable back. I have no idea what or why but it was obviously defective.

Lisa