While the world focuses on Apple’s latest slew of new products, we are taking a moment for the last bastion of Apple’s proprietary past—the one remaining product with a Lightning connector that, somehow, Apple still sells.
We have previously lamented Apple’s drawn-out transition to USB-C. It’s been far from quick and far from straightforward, leaving a mess of dongles and confusion in its wake.
It was last year, at its September 2024 “Glowtime” event, that Apple made the move to change that, transitioning all of its newest products to USB-C. The following month, it—somewhat quietly—moved the remaining current-generation accessories, including the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad, over to USB-C.
By February this year, it had stopped selling the remaining Lightning-supporting iPhones—the iPhone SE (3rd Gen) and the iPhone 14 family—following the EU’s ruling for all of its devices to move to a nonproprietary connector by 2025.
But one solitary device is still hanging on as the final Lightning product that Apple sells. That product is the Apple Pencil (1st Gen)—a product that was released 10 years ago, in 2015.
The Apple Pencil strategy has been pretty complicated, with Apple selling no less than four different models. The absence of backward compatibility of newer Pencils has kept the Gen 1 Pencil in the lineup to service the older Lightning-touting iPads—as well as being compatible with the 10th- and 11th-Gen USB-C iPads, for anyone who upgraded.
Apple generally supports its hardware with OS updates for five to seven years. Even though it no longer sells these products, Apple has confirmed that iPadOS 26 will be compatible with the iPad Air (3rd Gen) and iPad Mini (5th Gen), both released in 2019, and the iPad (8th and 9th Gen), released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. All of these only support the Apple Pencil (1st Gen), and none of the other Pencils above it, meaning it’s seemingly a hard product for Apple to get rid of—despite its desperately aging connector.
Based on that five-to-seven-year timeline, that could mean the Lightning still has as many as three years left in Apple’s inventory. Unless, of course, it makes the call to leave older iPad owners to the second-hand Pencil market, and finally retires Lightning for good.
