These white iPhone lightning cables are the worst cables from Apple that I have experienced. I have Apple mice with USB cables that are 10 years old and still working, but I have not had a lightning cable that has lasted the year out. It’s even worse than this.  I’m moving my mouse around for a few hours day, yet my lightning cable only gets plugged in once each night to recharge. Most of the time it’s just sitting there doing nothing. Yet the white becomes brittle with age and starts to crack & peel and eventually leave the internal wire exposed. Here’s a video of how I repaired it with a cigarette lighter and some heat shrink. It’s a fairly easy and good looking repair as you can see from the photos.

Before:

Apple’s poorly designed lightning cable can perish and become brittle.

After:

A broken lightning cable after I have repaired it with some 6mm heat shrink.

Video of the lightning cable repair

Here’s the video of the repair. You’ll need I some 6mm heat shrink and a cigarette lighter. I found a pack of 8 length of 6mm heat shrink for $3.50 on eBay from ‘heatshrink-king.’

My commentary is not very good! I was too busy focussing on the repair. Here are some things I should have said:

• 6mm is the diameter of the heat shrink before it is heated. It shrinks to about 1/2 the original size when it is heated which means it ends up it 3mm diameter. 6mm allows it to fit nicely over the iPhone lightning plug. Any smaller and it won’t fit, any larger and it will be too lose after it shrinks.
• You can also use a hair dryer or a heat gun to shrink the heatshrink.
• Hold the heatshrink inside the lighter flame, where it is cooler and there is less soot. If you hold it above the flame it will go black from soot and it may burn.

If you want to see how to repair a magsafe connector, check out this good article by Jurriaan de Vos.

Don’t be too fussy about the heat shrink.  I had an old piece of black heat shrink lying around which was too big for the job, but after it shrunk I was able to squash it in against the cable  with my fingers ( be careful not to burn yourself!) and it turned out like this:

A makeshift repair I was able to do on a different lightning cable with some heat shrink that was too big.