Are all lightning cables the same or is there a different wattage between the IPhone 5 and IPad mini cable

watch_mania wrote:

I'll redo the iPad charging test using the iPad wall charger with all those 3 cables, just to make sure. It had just been fully charged though, so it might be a while before the next charge 😝

If you took a look at my original post containing the above paragraph, you'll see that the first 4 paragraphs seems to have smaller font compared to the 5th ones. Yet I didn't do anything weird there while typing. Was it because of the emoticons?

I'm not really sure why my life is full of these kind of things!

I'm following this issue because I have wondered about differences in cables and their effects on chraging. I'm new to the iPad, having recently bought an Air 2 but I have had a long history with a myriad of Android devices, the latest being a Samsung Galaxy Note 4. The Note 4 is Qualcomm QuickCharge 2.0 certified and will charge much more quickly if a certified charger is used. What I have noticed with it is that if I don't use the supplied microUSB cable with the charger, that QuickCharge may not work and "standard" charging will occur (you can tell because a notification pops up on the phone if QuickCharge is in effect). Some cables support QuickCharge, some don't so at least in that case cabling makes a difference.

I purchased several Amazon-branded Lightning cables for my iPad and I had wondered if they worked as well charging as the OEM cable (data sync does work). I haven't noticed any real difference but after reading this thread I have ordered a charger meter to sort out differences among the mass of cables and chargers and external batteries that I have for all of my devices.

sparksd wrote:

I haven't noticed any real difference but after reading this thread I have ordered a charger meter to sort out differences among the mass of cables and chargers and external batteries that I have for all of my devices.

You know how this all happened right? USB specification, at least up until 2.0, never considered the connection for charging devices, and specifies maximum current of 500mA. USB charging are very messy over there, in the past, we have external hard drives that requires 2 USB ports to work correctly to get >500mA of current, dumb charger which means data pins are shortened allowing >500mA current, cables with particular resistance on the data pins which only works for specific devices, and now I believe QuickCharge with their own standards are entering the scene too.

USB 3.x, at least with its USB 3.1 Type-C does specifies standards regarding higher current of up to 3A on 5V-mode. More mess to come.

If you're interested, the Xiaomi power banks will pull power to its highest of 2.2A with dumb cables. They do seem to have internal charger voltage drop check to prevent your lower-rated chargers from exploding, though!

Considering that 500 million people have those cables, 1600 not liking it is irrelevant. Because it's only the ones who don't like it that will bother clicking a rating, mostly people whose original cable has failed.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

Note also that there are THREE microcircuits in the Lightning end of the cable, but they have nothing to do with charging. They provide verification that the cable is certified, they make it possible to put the cable in with either side up by dynamically reassigning pins, and they provide digital to analog services.

While Apple always does good job in hiding its technology complexity from the users, the actual underlying mechanism isn't always that simple. Also, I don't think they would just put the chip there for authenticity without any other purposes than making the customer buys their expensive cables, at least based on my hypothesis on the charge current differences, I don't think they're that "evil".

I assume the digital to analog services you mean are in the Lighning to HDMI AV adaptor?

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/149946-one-reason-for-apples-overpriced-cab les-the-lightning-digital-av-adapter-has…

Few folks like that cable. Seems to fail too soon.

1591 bought cheap 3rd party lightning cable, which is fine for charging an iPhone. While I can assure that those cables now do have pretty good lightning connector quality, none of them allows more than 1A of charging, except probably for the certified 2.1A-ones. Not a good option to charge an iPad, unfortunately.

Neither. The device determines its need. The "charger" is in the phone. The cable is a cable. The USB adapter is a power source. It has no intelligence.

While this is true for the old days of dumb chargers providing 750mAh-1A currents, this is not the case for today's USB power adaptor, which utilises handshaking mechanism almost like the one found in USB specification. I would say Samsung chargers would be the dumbest chargers these days. This guy know what he's talking about:

http://www.plutanium.cz/babca/cs/1718-apple-ipad-charging-modes-analysis

And it's more than just a "dumb" resistor. The fastest way to charge my Xiaomi 16000mAh is with a dumb charger -- in which cables with data pins shorted can simulate it. Yet even without the data pins resistor mechanism in place, the iPad 4 charger won't "allow" it to pull more than 1.5A, which implies that it is possibly doing it through voltage drop mechanism. However, the Samsung charger gives 2.1A-ish just fine.

Lawrence Finch wrote:

Im sorry, but there is so much wrong and misinformation in your post that I'm not going to waste time commenting on it. Have a nice day.

Thanks, you too. Well I'm happy now that I can charge my iPad 4 with the Xiaomi 16000mAh as advertised and pinpoint the issue. What did I do wrong?

watch_mania wrote:

sparksd wrote:

I haven't noticed any real difference but after reading this thread I have ordered a charger meter to sort out differences among the mass of cables and chargers and external batteries that I have for all of my devices.

You know how this all happened right? USB specification, at least up until 2.0, never considered the connection for charging devices, and specifies maximum current of 500mA.

Nonsense, max power for a USB charge port can be as high as 5A at 5V

USB Power Delivery[edit]

Profile	+5 V	+12 V	+20 V
1	2.0 A, 10 W	N/A	N/A
2		1.5 A, 18 W	N/A
3		3.0 A, 36 W	N/A
4			3.0 A, 60 W
5		5.0 A, 60 W	5.0 A, 100 W

In July 2012, the USB Promoters Group announced the finalization of the USB Power Delivery ("PD") specification, an extension that specifies using certified "PD aware" USB cables with standard USB type A and B connectors to deliver increased power (more than 7.5 W) to devices with larger power demand. Devices can request higher currents and supply voltages from compliant hosts – up to 2 A at 5 V (for a power consumption of up to 10 W), and optionally up to 3 A or 5 A at either 12 V (36 W or 60 W) or 20 V (60 W or 100 W).^[95] In all cases, both host-to-device and device-to-host configurations are supported.^[96]

And as far back as 2007:

Charging ports[edit]

The USB Battery Charging Specification Revision 1.1 (released in 2007) defines a new type of USB port, called the charging port. Contrary to the standard downstream port, for which current draw by a connected portable device can exceed 100 mA only after digital negotiation with the host or hub, a charging port can supply currents between 500 mA and 1.5 A without the digital negotiation.

That covers USB 1.1 and 2.0, 8 years ago.

Csound1 wrote:

And as far back as 2007:

Charging ports[edit]

The USB Battery Charging Specification Revision 1.1 (released in 2007) defines a new type of USB port, called the charging port. Contrary to the standard downstream port, for which current draw by a connected portable device can exceed 100 mA only after digital negotiation with the host or hub, a charging port can supply currents between 500 mA and 1.5 A without the digital negotiation.

That covers USB 1.1 and 2.0, 8 years ago.

Wow, wow, hold on there. USB 2.0 specification is finalised by 2000, and maximum power draw is 500mA.

The USB battery charging spec was published due to the industry start making dedicated wall dumb charger with shorted data pins allowing >500mA current without any agreement and causing mess to the "additional" usage of USB-A form factor. It has NOTHING to do with USB 1.1 and 2.0 specification, apart from it allows more power draw from a connector with USB-A form factor. Also, while I couldn't find the published 1.0 specification, I just checked the 1.1 version and it was released by 2009, instead 2007.

I can remember those times of charging Nokia E71 with proprietary DC connector to get 800mA or so, though it is the same 5V DC power. I can also remember at that period I wasn't even interested with my sister's iPhone 1, however strongly thought that the product was meant for a very different target user.

I wonder how many Apple users had such attitude problem of suddenly being smart after reading Wikipedia for a couple of minutes.

What are you babbling about, the USB2 revision was indeed ratified in 2000, but I was only going back was far as 2007 (I have little interest in 15 yr old USB devices)

And in 2007 the power maxima was 1.5A (1500mA)

You, your Nokia and sis's iPhone 1 notwithstanding.

This has helped me a bit. However, i cant still figure it out the reason why I cant use my lightning cable for my iphone5 into my ipadmini when i'm using it with wall charger(1A output) but when I plugged it into my powerbank with 1A, it's working. Can you help me find the reason for this? Thanks!

I know that this thread is old but wanted to add an observation. I have a Surface 3 tablet that uses micro-USB to charge. Like an iPad, it takes a more powerful charger to charge and power it. As mentioned here, I purchased more than one 2.4 amp USB wall chargers and thought that "that would be that". What I noticed, however, was that some cables would charge the unit and some would not. I finally figured out that cables made with 20 gauge wire worked and those with thinner wire did not. I suspect that it is merely a matter of cable resistance. The higher the resistance, the lower the current...thinner cables caused the current to fall below the minimum required by the device. Although all Apple cables look the same, perhaps some have different internal materials and varying resistance. Just a thought.

Few folks like that cable. Seems to fail too soon.

http://store.apple.com/us/product/MD818AM/A/lightning-to-usb-cable?fnode=8d43b25 760ca28f8c3e5fe82aaa95b4f7033d39526b026b…

I sincerely doubt his analysis, unless one of the cables was not an Apple cable, because Apple says they are the same; specifies the same cable for both the iPhone and iPad:

No difference at all.