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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

>> It’s rugged, reliable

In my experience it works well for 2-3 years then wears out and charging becomes very difficult after that. The connector also breaks easily as it is essentially a totally exposed fragment of a circuit board.

The design was light years ahead of everything else for a long time but these days, everything should be USB-C.

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I’ve never found Lightning connectors to fail, but the cable to connector junction does seem to wear out after a few years, especially on Apple cables with that terrible vinyl-like stress relief material.

But USB-C is pretty young. It remains to be seen if cables and connectors are really durable forever.

I am still suspicious of the complexity of the nested male/female design with the inner male blade being part of the device and hard/impossible to fix if broken. . . but have not seen any problems on my increasing number of USB-C devices yet.

I've broken one USB-C port since 2017, and it was in a power bank. The arcing was brief, and the smoke release moderate. Once I teased the remaining wire fragments inside the socket apart, I filled the socket with hot glue, and continue to use the power bank today.

I've broken all USB-C I've had except the last one (and except another one that I lost) which I now have to use to charge everything :|

Charging issues after a couple of years are usually due to lint accumulation in the phone opening. A little careful time with a toothpick will usually get it sorted.

It isn't just that. It physically wears out as well.

My first gen iPad Pro and iPhone 6s Plus say otherwise.

One pin on the cable (male part) becomes oxidized (black) after time. One can rub the black stuff away using a regular rubber and it usually works again.

I've used contact cleaner and toothpicks to solve this problem before. It only works so many times, eventually it's just totally shot. I've never had a cable fray but I've had 3 or 4 lightning connectors become useless.

I didn't find lightning to fail so much as have the female end fill up with lint. Go digging with a wooden toothpick, pull out some bellybutton lint and it worked good as new.

I've always had more issues with USB-C connector than lightning, it's very sensitive and lint/dust gets both ends of it. Absolutely hate latching mechanism of usb-c.

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