Eight years and hundreds of millions of devices later, Apple's weird, flat, ubiquitous plug might finally be signing off.
The oldest piece of tech I use is a cable. I'm fairly sure it came with my roommate's now-dead 4th generation iPod, the glowing blue click wheel one, which he would have bought in 2004, when Bush was in his first term and computer nerds were still excited about the Pentium 4. The only other eight-year-old gadget I have — a DVD player with a three-disc carousel — is sitting in a closet. I doubt it still powers up. The cable, though, snaps into the base of my iPhone 4S without a fight. It charges like new.
The iPhone dock connector has been a remarkably persistent standard in an industry defined by a lack of persistent standards, and kept alive by a company known for flaunting them. The first dock connector appeared in the 2003 iPod — before that, iPods used Firewire — and has been there ever since, in almost every iPod, every iPhone, and every iPad.
Via: ifixit.com
Since 2004, when Apple switched the dock connector's power rail from Firewire to USB, it hasn't changed much — a few of its 30 pins have assigned or reassigned new jobs, like video transfer, but a cable from 2004 can still charge and sync a device sold today, at the very least. The biggest change has been feel: the early dock connector had a mechanical locking system to prevent the plug from slipping out, which gave it a satisfying CLICK. The last few generations of dock connector operate more smoothly, but the action is still unique: less resistant than a USB port, yet more mechanical.
Every big gadget company has tried a proprietary port at some point, but nearly all have given up. They've since congregated around the same standard — and in Europe, legally mandated — MicroUSB port for charging and syncing. MicroUSB ports are almost apologetically small, and placed on smartphones as if as an afterthought, often on the side or top, near the headphone jack. Sometimes they even get a small plastic flap, ostensibly for protection from dust but, spiritually, I think, as a human-like expression of modesty. Ports, mechanical or otherwise, are unseemly.
Apple's port, on the other hand, dominates half of the bottom face of the iPhone, a lone, gaping reminder that this otherwise seamless device is still just a messy bundle of copper, steel, plastic and wires. A peek into an iPhone or iPod's dock connector is the easiest way to guess its age — dust and scum accumulates gradually, like floating trash in the phone design's only eddy. In form, the cable harks back to Apple's long-passed white plastic era, and can almost look out of place strung between a brushed aluminum MacBook and a black glass iPhone. (Apple's once-total white aesthetic lives mainly in wire form, in sync cables, laptop chargers, and earbuds.)
Now, for the first time, it looks like it's going to change. The next generation of iPhone is rumored to have a much smaller dock connector that would fully break compatibility for the first time in eight years. The dock connector as we know it is on deathwatch.
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jwherrman/the-remarkable-life-of-the-dock-connector
