[Analyse] Lightning: why its abandonment will be anything but ecological

Tony Fadell, the creator of the iPod, didn’t have enough harsh words against his former employer. ” Our planet is more important than a damn connector” said the one who is also, incidentally, the inventor of the Lightning port. At first glance, everything is going well, and the standardization around a single port will limit the proliferation of chargers and adapters… which is indeed good for the planet.

But this reasoning only applies if we do not take into account the 1.5 billion iPhone and iPad users, who very often also have Lightning-compatible connected accessories. And when these same users already in the iOS eco-system change their iPhone or iPad and end up with a device that only has a USB-C port, this will generate a huge mass of additional accessories… or waste.

The USB-C adapters will indeed be torn off, the latter guaranteeing the compatibility of the next iPhone / iPad USB-C with the Lightning accessories in possession of these same users. And in the worst case (accessory not compatible with an adapter), the accessories in question will end up in the dumpster or on resale sites (but no one will want accessories that are not compatible with the new standard). We are talking here of hundreds of millions of users concerned, and therefore of a colossal mass of electronic waste to come.

So unless you want to make Apple give up (which incidentally seems to be somewhat the case with Fadell given the tone used), the argument of ecological responsibility looks like a huge decoy, especially since it we must not forget that when the Lightning arrived on the market, the latter was technologically far superior to the competing port on Android. It is therefore not only for the sake of locking down its ecosystem that Apple launched the Lightning, but also (and above all) because the only existing technology was then extremely mediocre and limited Apple’s ambitions in terms of data transfer. .

It’s also not as if there were a dozen ports competing, which would indeed result in an insane multiplication of the number of adapters and chargers. 2 ports for transfer and charging, we have seen much worse in terms of anti-ecological diversity, especially in the technology and IT sectors. Still, the well-rehearsed discourse on the single port has completely obscured the big side effects of the abandonment of Lightning on Apple devices, all of this for a “damn connector”.