It’s not Apple if it doesn’t release a cursed dongle after an event.
The iPhone 15 series was just announced, and both the iPhone 15 and the iPhone 15 Pro make for great smartphones. The iPhone 15 is bringing a slew of additions such as the Dynamic Island, while the iPhone 15 Pro has an A17 Pro, a titanium body, and lots of features to check out. The phones also finally replace the Lightning port with USB Type-C, but if you have some Lightning accessories or cables you aren’t ready to give up yet, Apple has a new adapter for you to spend money on.
In classic Apple fashion, the company has begun selling an adapter that lets you connect any Lightning cable or accessory into the new iPhone 15 or another Apple device with a USB-C port. There is a USB-C cable in the box with the new iPhones, so you shouldn’t really need this to use your existing cable into your iPhone — it would be a different story if the iPhone came with no cable. Rather, this is more geared towards being able to plug in old accessories, such as EarPods wired earbuds (which Apple did also release in a USB-C flavor as well).
As dumb as this dongle might look, it’s much less cursed than the one Apple released back when the 10th gen iPad was released. That one existed purely to make the Lighting-based Apple Pencil work with newer iPads. To use it, you basically needed to plug in a USB-C to USB-C cable into your iPad and into the dongle, and then plug in your Apple Pencil into the other end of the dongle. It was an overly complicated design. This particular adapter should also technically allow you to charge the first-gen Apple Pencil with the 10th gen iPad, since you can actually just connect the pencil into this adapter’s Lightning end and plug that into the USB-C port of the iPad. iPad support is mentioned in the adapter’s description, so maybe?
You can buy the USB-C to Lightning Adapter now from the Apple Store for $29.00. That seems like a high price, but maybe we’ll see more affordable third-party alternatives soon. There are already plenty of adapters that work the other way around.
