According to the knowledgable cables experts at Double Helix Cables, it’s a very bad idea to buy any third-party Lightning cables or adapters currently on the market. Third-party cables almost certainly will not work at all, as they lack Apple’s proprietary authentication chips.
A new teardown finds that Apple’s newest cable comes with authentication chips, which are located between the V+ contact of the USB and the power pin on the new Lightning plug. Because of this, it would have been next to impossible for third-party manufacturers to have already produced less expensive, generic cables by this time.
In an email toAppleInsider, Peter at Double Helix Cables speels out the details:
There is basically no way those are functional cables. You can’t just build a Lightning cable by making something with the same shape and connectivity, and my teardown proves that. The chip has to be there, and it is directly in the signal path of the V+ wire.
To anyone who has already purchased a third-party Lightning cable or adapter, I suppose the moral of the story is that you shouldn’t be so quick to trust third party products – especially for Apple’s products, which often contain proprietary mechanisms!
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