Lighting is for charging and nothing else? Really?

Tell that the people, who want to connect their professional microphone to make TikToks. Tell that the people, who want to connect a stick drive to offload their videos. Tell that the people who provide different accessories.

Lighting has evolved from the 30-pin Dock connector. The 30-pin Dock connector was the idea to combine charging, USB, and some analog stuff into one single connector. At that time USB provided only 5V and 200mA. Apple was one of the other who improved USB charging by allowing more power. But for the sake of compatibility, you cannot just do this, you need to negotiate it. It is like every USB up to USB3 starts in USB1.1 to negotiate the possibilities.

So, Lighting was not developed out of thin air. It was developed with a history, like many many other communication protocols and standards. Even as Apple is known for cutting of old ties easily, if you look really deep into the details, you will always find compatibility to old out-dated technologies. Its like you still find the good old 8051-core in many things, like even dead simple and cheap charge controllers.

While you might only use Lightning for charging, it is an accessory port. It can transmit data to computers, it can talk to SD cards, it can output HDMI.

You could argue you that you don't need any of those features, but Apple disagrees and that's why lightning is not just a 5V DC jack.

My argument (or question) isn't that Lightning is useless or that I don't need it, but that charging shouldn't require a lot of complex communication. I don't understand what it is about charging that requires both ends to have microcontrollers

It doesnt actually matter what the almost exclusive use case is, the sheer ability of being able to transmit data in this case and other available uses makes the apparent need of a chip. Keep in mind these chips bring safety to the exposed pins and some negotiation is needed to understand whats on the other side of the cable in order to better handle it. (That and to make it possible to control 3rd party market accessory) A charger is considered an accessory because it is merely a utility for a device, it is made to charge stuff. Take a purse for example, it merely holds stuff and nothing more, you can change a purse and the other one will do the exact same job.

> A charger is considered an accessory But because it is merely a utility for a device

Yes I understand the reasoning behind it, but I don't understand why it's not seen as a much more important feature to be able to load from anything anywhere so long as the +5V and GND pins are working, regardless of what power source and cable it is.

That there is complexity when the lightning cable and connector is used as a data transfer cable I understand. I don't understand why the charger mode isn't dumb as rocks.

Because destroying chargers with too much current, or lighting cables on fire is a bad PR?

I have a lot of cheap chargers, and they give out all sorts of crazy stuff. One drops the voltage to like 3.5 volts with 1 volt of ripple under load. Another shuts down the port completely if you draw >.6A.

It is really hard to tell how much current can one draw safety.

Primary use-case for a smart phone is the web-browser and networking array.

That doesn’t mean you can remove the microphone.

Optimising the common case in this instance will remove all other possibilities.

You don't have to remove negotiation and complexity from the system when it's used for data. My question isn't why those systems are there so much as why they are needed for the charging use case. E.g.: why do chargers even need more pins wired than +5V and ground? Is there really such a large benefit from making chargers "smart"?