Official–And Unofficial–Third-Party Lightning Cables Coming Soon

We’ve been tracking third-party Lightning cables pretty closely, because millions of people are receiving new iDevices and want a second charger.  We’ve seen the “authentication” chip cracked, and we saw a third-party cable that lights up, but none of them have beaten’s Apple’s $20 asking price for a Lightning cable. Until now. iPhone5Mod, the same people behind that light-up dock we covered earlier, have released more boring, straightforward Lightning cables–plus they’re significantly less expensive than Apple’s version. The bad news? They’re still $10.

Many cables using the cracked Chinese chips are not officially licensed Apple cables, and therefore they’re in a legal grey area. If you only want officially licensed-Apple goods plugging into your phone, iLuv has produced an entire line of Lightning-compatible accessories and cables. The bad news there is that they won’t be available until 2013, meaning they miss the all-important Christmas shopping season. Sometimes being bad does pay off.

Photo courtesy of iPhone5Mod.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Don’t buy an iPad 3 today unless you like the old 30-pin connector, Cheap third-party Lighting cables are coming soon,

Cheap third-party Lighting cables are coming soon

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. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: The new iPhone lightning connector may break third-party adapters, SanDisk announces 800GB SSD for enterprise users,