As well as the new display with its 16:9 aspect ratio perfectly suited to multimedia, the iPhone 5 introduced the Apple community to the Lightning port, which replaced the long-standing 30-Pin dock connector and earned Apple billions of dollars in ancillary revenue.

This is Day 16 of 30 Days of iPhone, a look at the moments that shaped the smartphone era .

The Controversial Introduction Of The iPhone’s Lightning Port

The 30-Pin Dock had been around longer than the iPhone. It graced the first iPod in 2003 and continued to appear in Apple’s digital audio players, as well as every iPhone since the platform launched, up to the iPhone 5. The new Lightning connector was smaller and reversible, so it could be inserted in either orientation and still work.

The community was not happy. The 30-Pin Dock was easy to find in a wide range of peripherals; speaker docks, car adaptors, charging cables, and more all relied on its continued presence. The iPhone 5 could not work with these accessories, and users would have to buy more cables and new accessories to get back to the same utility as the iPhone 4S.

Yet the changeover to the proprietary Lightning port was a huge benefit to Apple. It supplied 30-Pin-to-Lightning adaptors, established a “Made For iPhone” licensing program for manufacturers who wanted access to the Lightning port, and allowed Apple to phase out a legacy standard and its associated bulky design language.

As for the value of the MFi program, industry estimates suggest that Apple earned $4 per accessory that used a L ightning port connector . Spread over ten years and hundreds of millions of iPhones, the Lightning port was worth comfortably over a billion dollars for Apple.

Apple Forced To Say Goodbye To The iPhone’s Lightning Port

The next time the iPhone port changed it was done reluctantly. European regulators enacted policy for a universal charging port across all consumer electronics, and for smartphones that meant the USB-C standard. Rather than create two differing designs, Apple adopted USB-C throughout the iPhone design from 2023’s iPhone 15 .

This is Day 16 of 30 Days of iPhone. Yesterday, we looked at the first 16:9 widescreen display and the explosion of multimedia on the iPhone .