CABLECOATL: get your lightning cables working again!

As iPhone & iPad users may or may not be aware, beginning with iOS 7, Apple has been instituting a policy of exploiting their periodic iOS / firmware updates to render iPhones increasingly incompatible with non-OEM (i.e. non-Apple-manufactured) lightning cables. They made no secret of doing this at the time, and cited safety concerns as their reason, the implication being that unscrupulous electronics manufacturers who refused to subject their product to Apple's quality control standards were more than likely to be producing cables that will either brick your iPhone or, even worse, burst into flames on your nightstand while you sleep.

Ostensibly, this enforced incompatibility is supposed to apply only to cables that fail to meet Apple's official "MFi" technical specifications, which are standards that non-Apple-manufactured iPhone accessories must meet in order to earn Apple's official certification as being safe to use and compatible with all iOS devices. However, it is difficult to reconcile this with the fact that with every iOS update, even MFi-certified lightning cables are increasingly identified by your iOS device as incompatible and suddenly stop working.

Clearly this has nothing to do with quality control and everything to do with preserving profits for Apple, as their OEM cables routinely retail for 2 to 3 times as much as the knock-off cables do, if not more. In other words, Apple would much rather have you spend $30 on their cable than allow you to buy a $5.99 cable that works just as well, and evidently they are not above using unfair business practices to force you to do this.

Enter CABLECOATL, my response to Apple's ridiculously shady & environmentally irresponsible exercise in monopolistic profit-mongering. It is a simple adapter designed to fit snugly at the interface between your iPhone 5 and your non-OEM lightning cable, slightly modifying the insertion angle of the lightning connector into the iPhone port in a manner that allows the strength of the connection to overcome whatever current / resistance threshold Apple has fiddled around with to get their devices to work exclusively with their OEM cables. It has basically restored functionality to all of the non-OEM cables I have that stopped working after I updated to iOS 9 (I still haven't updated to 10, but when I do, I'll let you know if that changes anything, though I doubt it will).

In short, if you have an iPhone 5 & a non-OEM cable that seems to have stopped working, give CABLECOATL a try! If there's interest, I'd be happy to design iPad and iPhone 6 & 7 versions as well. Just send me a message or let me know in the comments!