Since the iPhone 8 era, some iPhone and iPad products have begun to support fast charging, and fast charging requires the support of chargers and charging cables: the charger needs to support the PD charging protocol, and the charging cable needs to use the new USB-C to Lightning data cable. And the upgrade of this data cable is far from as simple as changing the interface.

First of all, the C end of the new C to L data cable needs to be certified by the USB-IF Association and provide the corresponding TID number.

More importantly, the MFi chip inside the L end will also be upgraded.

In fact, the MFi chip terminal also has version iterations. Currently, most MFi data cables use the C48 chip. The successors are the C89 and C94 launched in August 2018. The former will be used in the new USB-A to Lightning charging cable, and the latter will be used in the USB-C to Lightning fast charging data cable.

In other words, if you want to use the fast charging function of your Apple product, you can only use the charging cable with the C94 terminal.

Moreover, Apple has upgraded the encryption level this time. It is said that the new "SHA256" dynamic encryption algorithm is basically the same as the encryption method of Bitcoin. It can be said that it is very uneconomical to crack it according to the current computing level; and the new dynamic encryption algorithm allows Apple to invalidate the "pirated data cable" by relying on system updates.

In addition, the data interface of the new C94 data cable has changed from gold to silver. This is not "gold plating shrinkage" to reduce costs, but Apple has upgraded the gold plating coating to "rhodium" metal or "ruthenium" metal. Both are rare metals with extremely low reserves. The properties are more stable than gold, which can solve the problem of easy damage to the gold contacts that occupy sweat; the prices of these two metals are also much higher than gold.

If you are not sure whether your data cable is an officially certified MFi data cable, you can check it on Apple's official query page. This website is updated every quarter. The names on it are all officially certified by Apple. When checking, pay attention to comparing the models. The models of cables of different lengths are different on this website.