Whereas the world focuses on Apple’s newest slew of recent 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 12 months, 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 12 months, it had stopped promoting the remaining Lightning-supporting iPhones—the iPhone SE (third Gen) and the iPhone 14 household—following the EU’s ruling for all of its gadgets to maneuver to a nonproprietary connector by 2025.
However one solitary machine continues 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 newer Pencils has stored the Gen 1 Pencil within the lineup to service the older Lightning-touting iPads—in addition to being suitable with the Tenth- and Eleventh-Gen USB-C iPads, for anybody who upgraded.
Apple typically helps its {hardware} with OS updates for 5 to seven years. Regardless that it now not sells these merchandise, Apple has confirmed that iPadOS 26 will likely 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 assist 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 growing older connector.
Based mostly on that five-to-seven-year timeline, that would imply the Lightning nonetheless has as many as three years left in Apple’s stock. Until, after all, it makes the decision to go away older iPad homeowners to the second-hand Pencil market, and eventually retires Lightning for good.
