On a 3-hour train journey I took here in Scotland a few weeks ago, a young guy was going up and down the carriages, desperately asking for help.
“Does anyone have an Apple cable? My phone is dead and I need to ring my parents to get them to pick me up at the station. Anyone? Please?”
I knew he meant a cable with a Lightning connector – that classic single-pronged piece of metal with the tiny lines on it, designed to fit into the bottom of Apple devices and absolutely nothing else in this world.
Alas for him, none of us were carrying one. This is still a fairly unusual thing, because of Apple’s enduring popularity – but it’s now set to change in two big ways.
Firstly, if you’re travelling with an iPhone as your chosen smartphone, you’re increasingly in the minority here: as of early 2024, Android has a 70% market share worldwide, compared to the 60%-and-falling dominance that Apple still has within the United States.
And secondly, Apple itself is ditching Lightning, so it looks like these connectors are finally about to go the way of the dodo.
Most people seem delighted about this, and I’m one of them. The much newer USB-C connector, which all new Android phones are using, is much faster, tougher and much less fiddly to use (it’s the one like a flattened loop of metal with rounded edges). Technically speaking it’s a big upgrade on the old micro USB type that the phones of a decade ago relied upon – you can see all three types in the image below and, critically, just about every gadget except Apple is now using USB-C.
Perhaps this only appears to be a nerdy annoyance to gadget obsessives like me – but really, it can turn into a trip-ruining thing. What happens if you’re on a two-week trip and on the second day you lose your Lightning cable, or it breaks? Outside of the North America, they’re relatively difficult to get a replacement for, and if you’re somewhere thoroughly off the beaten track (say, you’re sailing along the mighty Mekong river) then you’re in real trouble. No power? That means no photos, no videos, no excited email updates to loved ones – and you’re unavailable if there’s some kind of emergency back home.
All this can be at least as much of a disaster as when I was a teen on a two-week canal-boat holiday in England, and I looked over the side at all the pretty fish … and my spectacles slid off my face and went ker-plunk! into the water, never to be seen again.
(The rest of that trip was quite literally a blur for me.)
Happily, this knotty problem of charger connectors seems to be getting untangled at last. If you buy a new iPhone or iPad, it’ll be fitted as standard with USB-C – meaning that everyone’s cables will work with everyone else’s devices from now on, and you’ll always be able to borrow a cable from a stranger if yours gives up the ghost.
This could be Apple listening to the pleas of its customers, but rather more likely is that the European Union has successfully forced them to adapt or risk losing their market share. Last year the EU brought in new legislation requiring all gadget-makers to use USB-C ports – and as of this week, the United Kingdom is considering doing the same thing. Their reasoning: not only is it more convenient for us consumers, it’ll cut down on electronic waste in the long run.
But don’t worry, if you’re the holder of an older Apple device that still uses Lightning ports! For starters, Apple have released a USB-C to Lightning adapter to ensure you remain compatible – except it’s at the not-inconsiderable price-point of $29, so I’d recommend looking for one of the cheaper alternatives that will be coming on the market in competition with it.
All this feels like a moment of welcome sanity in the greatly messy saga of how we use our tech as we travel. And maybe something even better is on the horizon – wireless charging, where your phone’s battery will magically fill up from the very air itself!
But it still feels like a prawn-cocktail starter compared to the main course of gadget-related annoyances in the life of the experienced traveller: when we try to plug something into a wall socket and find our plugs don’t fit.
Yes, an entire industry has developed around creating travel adapters, the kind you’ll find on sale at any airport – but even so, they can vary greatly in quality, they can of course break, and you’ll always be able to find a horror story or two about someone who used an adapter that overheated and caused a fire.
Sadly, there’s currently no way around this (the adapter-using, I mean, not the fire-starting). Many countries used different voltages and currents, so even if the sockets were the same, plugging things into them could be extremely dangerous to your electronic hardware (for example, the Canada only uses about half the UK’s voltage – 120 V compared to 230 V). But of course all those connections are different as well. As far as I’m aware, there are 16 (!) different forms of wall socket to plug your devices into, so we’ll be juggling travel adapters of one form or another for a good while yet.
So yes, it may now be a little easier to charge your devices when you travel – but hey, don’t expect it to make sense out there.
(In case you’d find it handy, flight aggregator Skyscanner has a really terrific guide to all 16 types and all the countries they’re used in.)