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

While the world focuses connected Apple’s latest slew of new products, we are taking a infinitesimal for the past bastion of Apple’s proprietary past—the 1 remaining merchandise with a Lightning connector that, somehow, Apple inactive 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 the determination to alteration that, transitioning each of its newest products to USB-C. The pursuing month, it—somewhat quietly—moved the remaining current-generation accessories, including the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, implicit to USB-C.

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

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

The Apple Pencil strategy has been beauteous complicated, with Apple selling nary little than four antithetic models. The lack of backward compatibility of caller Pencils has kept the Gen 1 Pencil successful the lineup to work the older Lightning-supporting iPads—as good arsenic being compatible with the 10th- and 11th-Gen USB-C iPads if you didn’t fancy forking retired for the USB-C Apple Pencil.

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

Based connected that five-to-seven-year timeline, that could mean the Lightning inactive has arsenic galore arsenic 3 years near successful it, unless Apple makes the telephone to regenerate it and yet retires Lightning for good.