Lightning Cable Corrosion?

I have burned though several original Apple lighting cables (purchase 3 iPhones and a iPad mini). They all show the same issue of a burned contactor in the middle. I do love these cables though. My solution was to go on e-Bay and simply buy knock offs straight from China. I get 'em for a $1 or $2, shipped, and I buy 5 or 10 at a time. They last for several months and at the first site of problems I just chunk it and get a new one. And I don't feel bad for the price.

The lightning cable is great, but the 30 pin was a lot more resilient. I have 2 that have been in daily usage for years and show no problems with charging.

I finally got to an Apple store last week. They replaced my two Lighting cables, no questions asked.

They also replaced the battery in my 11 month old iphone 5 aftyer getting part way through a diagnositic test on it.

I now get at least double the battery life, so I am a happy camper.

Two funny things though: the "Genius Bar" let me make an appointment for 10:50am on a Sunday Morning, I later realized the store didnt oipen 'til noon...

I was in an area I don't know well, so I used Siri to get directions to the store in a mall near Durham, NC.

When I was within sight of the exit, but still on I40, she told me I had arrived, and should park the car and walk to the destination! It would have meant parking on an interstate and walking a half mile or more. Its bad enough to get an address that wrong, but an Apple store?

Oh, I have BAD news for everyone here and especially Apple.

This is NOT "corrosion", which if true, makes it easy to blame the customer.

This problem is the contacts are being BURNED out by excessive current flow through them.

The teensy contacts are just too SMALL to handle the charging current from the power supply.

A case of extremely poor design on the part of Apple. I would think the genius "electrical engineer" who posted here would have noticed this issue.

In the meantime, keep a spare on hand and keep exchanging the burned out cables with apple. 😠

GREAT fun!

I agree that the problem is more likely a design flaw and not moisture related. I've had two cables show the burned connectors and start failing to charge my iPad Air. I started noticing the darkened connectors on the lightning cables in only a few weeks after buying the iPad last in Nov 2013. Unlike a phone, my iPad is used at home only. It is always indoors and has never been exposed to moisture. The Air is my 4th iPad, and I never had any charging problems with the old connectors.

I have also burnt through 5 lightning cables: 3 Apple originals and 2 generic cables. They always corrode on the same pin. I don't want to buy a new cable because I know it will ultimately corrode and fail again!

Buying a new cable seems like putting a band-aid on a snake bite - it's just a temporary fix. I want to fix the root of the problem, but it doesn't seem like anyone knows what that is.

Since it's always the same pins on different cables that blacken, isn't it a logical conclusion that the problem is an external factor - not the cable itself but the port it's being plugged into? I agree the cables aren't durable enough, but isn't the problem actually caused by the PORT?

I would much rather have my port replaced (if that's the problem) than buying a new cable every 2 months.

Here I though I was crazy, I have an iPhone 7, iPad Pro, iPad mini, and an iPod (needless to say a lot of Apple chargers)

I even splurged for another 6ft cable...

Not only do I have to take alcohol and a q-tip to ALL the chargers once a month, I had to shrink tube the ends on all of them because within 90 days of ownership the spot where the lightening adapter meets cable opens up and exposes wires....

Has anyone found any real resolution to this? I am an Electrical Engineer, so I have experience in microelectronics, but this is ridiculous. My wife's iPad mini has had this issue. I leave the lightning connector attached to a USB outlet I installed in the kitchen and we use vinegar as a cleaning product for the counter, so at first I thought that was causing the corrosion, and I just took it to the Apple store for exchange (I had already cleaned off the cable as much as possible, but one side had gone so far as to lose a pin) hoping they would replace it for the lost pin and miss the corrosion. They gave me a new cable and all was working well. Just today I went to charge my wife's iPad mini again and it had a flickering charge indicator (this really cant be good for the electronics). The same problem has occurred on my new cable. I did notice that there is a blue discoloration (kind of looks like a poorly installed car battery color) on the lightning female portion on the iPad mini itself. This is definitely corrosion, but what is the source? The only thing I can think of would be steam from use in the kitchen near the stove, but water alone and at such infrequent times should not cause this kind of corrosion. I think I might take the iPad mini to my lab microscope to see what's going on in there, but otherwise we are off to the apple store again...

Rome, Italy, Iphone5s, bought one year ago (christmas 2013), I have three cables, one the original from apple, two OEM. I use them in more or less the same settings : i have one in my bag, one near my bed, one usually attached to my computer, but they "rotate".

Recently (last 2/3 weeks) i started experiencing the problem, sometimes it does not charge, sometimes it makes intermittent charge/not charging, sometimes it say the cable is not compatible. Removing, flipping, rubbing them a bit, etc... and then they usually work.

It does this on all three cables, and all three cables show the black/bluish stains (call it whatever you like) on the fourth pin starting from the left, on both sides. Some smaller black stains appear also on the nearby pins in one side of two of the three cables.

I tried "cleaning" it, but no way. I don't have a microscope to see if it is oxidation over the pin or corrosion of the pin itself. However, bluish stains are often on the plastic part, black ones on the pin itself, and they seem to be different, the bluish ones can be removed by rubbing, the black ones no. If I try to scratch the pin with something solid (a needle for example), i can feel the surface of the affected pin has some concavity (holes, craters, whatever).

As to moisture, I think Apple (and most other manufacturers following Apple) are taking the wrong side here. We have often humidity around 80/90% here, and our phones are with us in what could be even worse situations, like crowded places, sudden termical changes (in and out of a car in summer, in and out of house in winter) that can cause condensation. So, they should either tell us not to carry the phones with us too often, or made them able to resist these quite normal "shocks". Unless you dipped your phone in your cappuccino, i would not accept the "moisture" argument if not as a clever excuse to refuse to replace your phone.

I will buy a new cable as soon as possible, because I want to check if it's my phone and if it's permanent (that is, if it will make also the new cable have the same problem in a short time), and also I'm afraid that, be it corrosion/erosion/whatever, the contact surface on the cable is now smaller that it originally was, and that can cause damage to the contact in the phone itself, especially if there is an hypotheses of some electrical arcing.

it is not corrosion.

It is BURNED OUT contacts.

I just returned a month old lightening cable and was told by the store that I had exposed it to moisture! When I said that I had not, they did not belive me, but it appeard that this was not the first one of these that they saw. They told me that they woud replace it this one time but not again. This is why I pay them thousands of dollars, so that when a $3 cost cable fails they give me trouble? Not the way I would have handled it. They have a problem with this connector and are not prepared to admit it, so it is our fault.

Sorry, forgot to note that the corrosion is happening mainly on the VSUB/V++/Power providing pin, and to add this link. It is an image of pinouts for the lightning connector.

http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20121001/242892/?SS=imgview_e&FD=15 38214771&ad_q

Add me to the list of those whose lightning cables for iPhone 5 have corroded/ablated/eroded/oxidized [call it what you will, there's some kind of electro-chemical reaction going on there] to the point where the phone won't recognize them or take a charge through them. We have 3 iPhone 5s in our house, with 5 OEM cables, and all have the same issues. For a while the solution has been to wiggle the cord until a connection was finally established. As of today, that doesn't work any more on my phone. It's a royal pain to have to make the trek to an Apple store, but I guess that's my next step... The bigger worry is that there is an equivalent amount of decay on the contacts in the phone, which may require leaving the phone for service/repair and coming home phoneless!

Can you say "MAJOR DESIGN FLAW"?

This all has NOTHING whatever to do with WATER!

It is due to poor design.

The pathetic little contacts are NOT up to carrrying the amperage needed and are simply BURNING up.

Apple needs to STOP blaming the customer and TAKE responsibility for this mess. . . .

Not only has the corroding lightning cable been source of frustration getting my device to charge since the terminals have corroded but it has caused the middle contacts on my IPhone to corrode down to almost nothing. I had to order a replacement connector and the tools to fix it for over $60!.. Here is a link to the replacement part:

https://www.ifixit.com/Store/iPhone/iPhone-5-Dock-Connector-and-Headphone-Jack/I F118-003-1