Just One Lonely Product Still Uses Apple’s Lightning Connector—Can You Guess Which One?

While nan world focuses connected Apple’s latest slew of new products, we are taking a infinitesimal for nan past bastion of Apple’s proprietary past—the 1 remaining merchandise pinch a Lightning connector that, somehow, Apple still sells.

We person previously lamented Apple's drawn-out modulation to USB-C. It’s been acold from speedy and acold from straightforward, leaving a messiness of dongles and disorder successful its wake.

It was past year, astatine its September 2024 “Glowtime” event, that Apple made nan move to alteration that, transitioning each of its newest products to USB-C. The pursuing month, it—somewhat quietly—moved nan remaining current-generation accessories, including nan Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, complete to USB-C.

By February this year, it had stopped trading nan remaining Lightning-supporting iPhones—the iPhone SE (3rd Gen) and nan iPhone 14 family—following nan EU’s ruling for each of its devices to move to a nonproprietary connector by 2025.

But 1 solitary instrumentality is still hanging connected arsenic nan last Lightning merchandise that Apple sells. That merchandise is nan Apple Pencil (1st Gen)—a merchandise that was released 10 years ago, successful 2015.

The Apple Pencil strategy has been beautiful complicated, pinch Apple trading nary little than four different models. The absence of backward compatibility of newer Pencils has kept nan Gen 1 Pencil successful nan lineup to work nan older Lightning-touting iPads—as good arsenic being compatible pinch nan 10th- and 11th-Gen USB-C iPads, for anyone who upgraded.

Apple mostly supports its hardware pinch OS updates for 5 to 7 years. Even though it nary longer sells these products, Apple has confirmed that iPadOS 26 will beryllium compatible pinch nan iPad Air (3rd Gen) and iPad Mini (5th Gen), some released successful 2019, and nan iPad (8th and 9th Gen), released successful 2020 and 2021, respectively. All of these only support nan Apple Pencil (1st Gen), and nary of nan different Pencils supra it, meaning it’s seemingly a difficult merchandise for Apple to get free of—despite its desperately aging connector.

Based connected that five-to-seven-year timeline, that could mean nan Lightning still has arsenic galore arsenic 3 years near successful Apple's inventory. Unless, of course, it makes nan telephone to time off older iPad owners to nan second-hand Pencil market, and yet retires Lightning for good.