Apple Accessories: Kind of Annoying and Don’t Really Make Sense

Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin
Published in
2 min readDec 26, 2018

I imagine Apple has a sizable side-business selling some of their accessories. Converters from USB to USB-C or a headphone jack to a lightning cable, mini-display port to VGA … the list goes on (this is just the adapters section).

One thing that is a bit annoying right now is that if you upgrade you need a whole new set of adapters, especially as they remove ports from computers. This may be great in the not-too-distant future that has not fully arrived yet, but currently, it seems common use cases still requires older ports.

The other thing that doesn’t make sense to me is if you have some of the latest versions of devices, they don’t match up together and you need lots of adapters.

Right now some of the phones come with a lightning cable, that does not plug into a computer that has an old headphone jack, so you need the Lightning to 3.5 mm Headphone Jack Adapter. An iPad only takes a lightning port for headphones, computer takes a 3.5mm port. Anyways, there may be a time soon where everything is USB-C or just easy-to-use wireless, but that has not happened yet, so right now you need lots of random adapters to be able to use Apple devices. A bit clunky for a company where it seems to me the target experience is something that just works.

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Jeremy Keeshin
Jeremy Keeshin

CEO and co-founder at @CodeHS // Author Read Write Code // previously founded the Flipside