Apple Lightning
I'm curious -- what's the reason for something seemingly as simple as a Lightning cable to have chips inside of it?For most of computing history, I was generally under the impression that cables were "dumb" -- each pin connects to a wire which connects to a pin on the other end. There's fancy bundling and twisting and whatever involved, but it's still ultimately just conductive wires.When did cables start getting chips, and why? Did Apple start it or somebody else? Is it solely to try to prevent third-party manufacturers? Is it for the cable to announce to the port that it supports certain specifications of power or data? (But why would that require a chip instead of just some kind of "dumb" extra pin that has some basic electrical property that can be read?) Is it something else?I mean I understand why certain dongles have chips, because they're connecting between sets of pins that aren't 1-1 or even in the same data format at all. Or why the same might be true for USB-C to Lightning.But for cables to go from "dumb" to "smart" seems like it kind of breaks all expectations of what a cable even does, and therefore how a consumer will even know what to purchase -- which, of course, has famously been a HUGE issue with USB-C.Would it be better for us to go back to dumb cables without chips? Or are there good reasons why this is the future, where at some point we'll expect all computer cables to have them?