iPhone 15 with USB C: can you use adapters to connect Lightning accessories?

iPhone 15 with USB C: can you use adapters to connect Lightning accessories?،

Apple iPhones are the most popular smartphones in the world, and as such, many accessories have been made for them over the years. Even though they had a proprietary Lightning port, for which manufacturers had to pay a license to create connectors, iPhones accumulated a vast portfolio of third-party integrations.

Yes, we have simpler things like power banks and headphone adapters, but also a plethora of advanced devices like audio interfaces, thermal cameras, MIDI controllers and other gadgets that we have stocked at over the years.

And now ? Are these devices obsolete and useless? Or can they still work with the new iPhones if we get a USB C to Lightning adapter?

Lightning Accessories with iPhone 15: Do Adapters Work?

We have good news: chances are you can still use your Lightning accessories with the appropriate USB-C adapter! However, all adapters are now the same. To test and illustrate this, we purchased two products:

iPhone 15 with USB C: can you use adapters to connect Lightning accessories?

Apple’s official USB-C to Lightning adapter

against

USB-C to Lightning Adapters Recommended by Amazon

So we collected all the accessories we had and tested them both. Apple’s official USB-C adapter worked for every device we had on hand: an external Samsung SSD, an older Line 6 Sonic Port audio interface, and charging devices all worked with the iPhone 15 via connection USB-C to Lightning. Unfortunately, it’s not cheap as far as dongles go – it’s a $29 adapter that also happens to be bulky. However, its cable is at least high quality braided.

Dongle life

As for the cheap adapters you can get on Amazon, they are incredibly compact and can even be carried in your wallet. However, be aware that most, if not all, of them will be does not work with any audio equipment. So headphones, audio interfaces, and those “portable mics” with a Lightning connector won’t work. Some adapters have this warning in their description, others do not. However, in our experience, if an adapter is not explicitly marked as MFi, it will not support audio.

They TO DO support charging and, most often, enable data transfer. We used them to connect to PCs and Macs and had no problem transferring our files (at USB 2 speeds).

Connecting an external camera (like an action camera) through one of these adapters can have varying results: our iPhone started drawing power from the camera instead of accessing it as usual. it was a storage device. There are different models on the market, so some may still work, but we just can’t give you a 100% guarantee.