This is good news for people who’ve bought an iPhone, but are waiting for third-party cables as opposed to Apple’s $20 official option. We reported earlier that the Lightning cable has a chip inside. It’s either an authenticator chip, or more likely, a way for Apple to dynamically re-assign pins. Either way, it meant that we’d have to wait until someone was able to determine what the chip did and how to copy it. Word has come in today that iPhone5Mod has released a dock with an actual, working, third-party cable that lights up. And the dock doesn’t look halfway bad either.
The glowing cable does function without the dock. According to iPhone5Mod, the cable supports iTunes and data sync, so this isn’t a dumb charging cable. The whole package is called–quite originally–the Flash Lightning Dock. The demand has crashed iPhone5Mod’s website, but they’ve also dropped the price for the dock from $60 to $40, which isn’t a terrible price. While the cable alone is $20, which is the same price as Apple’s official option, this one lights up. And it portends manufacturers making cheap charging cables, unless Apple’s lawyers get involved and try to extract a licensing fee.
The dock is currently on sale from iPhone5Mod, but the traffic has borked their site. Their Twitter will tell you when its back up.
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