Whereas the world focuses on Apple’s newest slew of new merchandise, we’re taking a second for the final bastion of Apple’s proprietary previous—the one remaining product with a Lightning connector that, one way or the other, Apple nonetheless sells.
We’ve got beforehand lamented Apple’s drawn-out transition to USB-C. It’s been removed from fast and much from easy, leaving a large number of dongles and confusion in its wake.
It was final yr, at its September 2024 “Glowtime” occasion, that Apple made the transfer to alter that, transitioning all of its latest merchandise to USB-C. The next month, it—considerably quietly—moved the remaining current-generation equipment, together with the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, over to USB-C.
By February this yr, it had utterly discontinued the remaining Lightning-supporting iPhones—the iPhone SE (third Gen) and the iPhone 14—following the EU’s ruling for all of its units to maneuver to a nonproprietary connector by 2025.
However one solitary machine remains to be hanging on as the ultimate Lightning product that Apple sells. That product is the Apple Pencil (1st Gen)—a product that was launched 10 years in the past, in 2015.
The Apple Pencil technique has been fairly difficult, with Apple promoting a minimum of 4 completely different fashions. The absence of backward compatibility of recent Pencils has saved the Gen 1 Pencil within the lineup to service the older Lightning-supporting iPads—in addition to being suitable with the Tenth- and Eleventh-Gen USB-C iPads should you didn’t fancy forking out for the USB-C Apple Pencil.
Apple usually helps its {hardware} with OS updates for 5 to seven years. Though it now not sells these merchandise, Apple has confirmed that iOS 26 can be suitable with the iPad Air (third Gen) and iPad Mini (fifth Gen), each launched in 2019, and the iPad (eighth and ninth Gen), launched in 2020 and 2021, respectively. All of those solely help the Apple Pencil (1st Gen), and not one of the different Pencils above it, that means it’s seemingly a tough product for Apple to eliminate—regardless of its desperately getting older connector.
Primarily based on that five-to-seven-year timeline, that might imply the Lightning nonetheless has as many as three years left in it, except Apple makes the decision to interchange it and at last retires Lightning for good.