The 30-pin dock connector has been taking up space on the bottom of Apple’s devices for quite some time. The iPhone and the iPad both use the “Apple cable” to charge and sync data but this is going to change, according to recent reports.
Forget about microUSB before you get your hopes too high! Neither that nor the Thunderbolt are valid options because of microUSB’s slow transfer speeds and Thunderbolt’s limited support. Instead, Apple may be replacing the 30-pin dock connector with a different but smaller version of it (which might or might not have 30 pins). According to hear-say, the upcoming iPhone will be the first Apple device to introduce the new connection type. That would of course mean one additional cable (or a converter) for some.
