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Apple’s Vision Pro battery pack is hiding the final boss of Lightning cables

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A picture of the connector from the Vision Pro battery. It looks like a Lightning connector, only wider and with four extra pins.
The Vision Pro’s not-a-Lightning-connector connector. | Image: Nilay Patel / The Verge

Ray Wong of Inverse discovered a hidden joy today: The Apple Vision Pro power cable connects to the battery with what may well be Lightning’s final form. Using a SIM removal tool, he pushed into a small hole in the silver external battery pack of the Vision Pro next to the cable, and…

Out it popped, revealing what looks like a 12-pin version of the connector Apple’s iPhone moved away from last year.

Nilay Patel, Verge editor-in-chief and Vision Pro reviewer, gave it a shot, and what do you know? The rumors are true. Like a Palpatinian twist, somehow, Lightning returned. Whether this was Apple intentionally propping up the crumbling walls of its garden or it’s just trolling everyone after the EU essentially forced it to switch the iPhone to USB-C, it’s a funny discovery:

A picture of the Vision Pro battery connector removed from the battery, with a third-party lightning connector next to it and a SIM removal tool on the table by them.
Image: Nilay Patel / The Verge
The connector from the Vision Pro battery (bottom) compared to a Lightning connector (top).

In an alternate timeline, this might have been USB-C, part of a world where external batteries for the headset are plentiful and don’t need Apple’s special approval (or is that spatial approval? Ha ha, just a little Vision Pro humor there). Sure, you can plug a separate external battery into the USB-C port of the battery pack, but daisy-chaining portable batteries together to get more than a couple of hours of untethered use is probably going too far.