[kalleboo]

Oddly enough I've actually had much worse reliability with Lightning than with MicroUSB. Our home has suffered bad from corroded power pins[0].

What happens is you have one lightning cable with a bad contact, and that causes electric arcing to corrode the power pin in the phone, and now the phone will have bad contact with any new cable you bring in, causing arcing on that cable. Now if you have multiple devices in a household sharing the same charging cables, the "plague" spreads. The only solution is to buy all new chargers, iPhones and iPads all at the same time.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/lightning-cables-failing-due-t...

[sbierwagen]

I would be very surprised if you were getting arc damage with five volts at two amps. More plausible would be some electrochemical/galvanic corrosion effect.

[gowld]

Arcing and corrosion isn't contagious. Humidity causes arcing and corrosion; corrosion would prevent arcing for the same reason it would prevent charging -- it increases resistance.

[kalleboo]

Then what IS the explanation for all of our lightning cables quickly developing blackened and pitted power pins? This was the only explanation I could find.

[jhayward]

There were a number of people posting in forums about this back in 2014 or so. Apple even went so far as to contact folks and ask them to send the cables in for analysis. As far as I know, the consensus was that perhaps the port contact spring was failing to maintain a good connection.

I don't know what the current status is but it doesn't seem to be an inherent design issue, except for the fact that the port has the springy bits and isn't easily replaced.