The road to a unified interface for the iPhone 14
Sep 26, 2022| Apple has not been making mobile phones for a long time, but on the road of unified interface, it has taken steps early.
When the mobile phone was just born, when it was still in the form of a big brother, charging needed to use a cradle charger, which was bulky and slow to charge. Before and after the 1990s, Nokia opened the chapter of the mobile phone empire, bringing the iconic small hole charging interface and portable charger, so people were less painful to charge their mobile phones. In 1996, Nokia introduced the 14-pin Pop-Port interface, which later became a dedicated interface for mobile phone data transmission, headset, camera connection, etc.
In mobile phones at that time, the charging interface was only responsible for charging, and the data interface was responsible for data.
Around the 1990s, Apple began to develop the "FireWire" interface, commonly known as IEEE 1394, before the well-known USB was born. When the first-generation iPod came out in 2001, it featured a FireWire interface that could both charge and transfer songs.
In 2003, the iPod switched from FireWire to a 30-pin connector, and over the next decade it became the dedicated connector for Apple's mobile devices, including the iPod and the Jobs-era iPhone.
Around the same time as the original iPod, the Mini USB interface specification was promulgated, and its successor was Micro USB in 2007. At this time, in the mobile phone industry, the interfaces between the major brands are different. If you have been in contact with mobile phones of this era, you may have seen such bizarre monsters.
Fortunately, this pain did not last long. In a few years, there are basically only two interfaces, Micro USB and Lightning, in the mobile phone market. The last model of Nokia followed the use of Micro USB, and the rise of Android phones further promoted the popularization of the Micro USB interface. The iPhone adopted the Lightning interface from the iPhone 5 in 2012, and it has continued to this day. When ordinary consumers buy data cables, they can simply say Android or Apple cables.
In this case, can we go further and leave only one interface on the phone?
