I know it’s not “the thing to do” nowadays. And I know that that insufferable little prick of a kid from the ad ended up hitting on something as far as mobile devices and their role in life is concerned, but I still sit down on my desk and use the lightning cable that came with my phone to plug it into my computer.
Yes, like back in the day. No. I see no reason to deviate from that. Wi-Fi sync may be nice, but even at USB 2.0 speeds there’s something about transferring music and backing up your phone to your computer using a cable as though an actual physical event is necessary. It’s an experience, the kinds of which get ever less frequent as machines get ever better at doing things on our behalf. The problems started not that long after plugging it in however, when Windows made the classic disconnect sound. Not the worst thing in the world. In fact, expected when you remember that Windows occasionally seems to forget that USB is a thing and how it’s supposed to handle it.
Then it made the noise again, and again, and again. And by that point I had it pinned down to the only thing I had recently plugged in. The fact that my poor phone’s battery was cycling between charging and not every couple of seconds also helped to pinpoint the issue.
An issue I was not prepared to deal with. I’ve done the same thing with phones for years and this is the first time that a cable has died on me. Not even the ancient phones which you actually needed to sync via USB to get updates to and from had a failure like these on my tenure. It’s not like I’ve even had this phone for particularly long. But here I was, and my suspicions were confirmed when I finally dug out a second Lightning cable from storage and everything went back to normal.
The entire thing made me consider the future of phone and computer interactivity. Rather, if there even will be one for very long. With phone OS’s becoming ever more robust and that you can get pretty much anything you need on it for everyday computing use without ever using the data transfer capabilities of the charge port, there’s a more than credible argument to say that it won’t be. I am hopeful it will stay here for a while. With Ive gone from Apple, phones have gotten slightly thicker and more practical; the vision for the smooth aluminum and glass pebble with no buttons or ports has been put on standby. A good thing too, since everyone would follow suit the second they saw Apple doing it.
But if nothing else, I kinda have to accept that plugging your phone into your PC is now an edge case. The cable only serves to plug it to your (non-provided) brick to charge, and even then if you haven’t fallen for the lords of complacency and not just gotten a Qi pad.
As for me, after I had verified that it was the cable to blame and commending its connection integrity to the great beyond, it went into a recycle bin and I got one of those 4-packs so that I don’t have to dig out spares next time. Meet the new cable, more braided than the old cable.
