I wanted to order a cable to connect my old KORG Midi controller to my new MacBook Pro. One end needed to be USB-C, and the other end needed to be an older USB connector that I wasn’t sure of the name of.
Here’s a great chart from RS-components in Australia that names all the USB connectors to help you easily find the one you need.
To connect your iPhone, iPad or iPod to your home stereo you just need a 3.5mm to RCA cable like this cable above. The two RCA connectors plug into the back of your stereo and the 3.5mm plugs into the headphone jack of your iPhone. Pretty much every stereo available has RCA inputs as the standard inputs on the back. If you want the best possible audio quality, then an Apple iPod dock will make it sound even better, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
This article is about the kind of cable you need to plug your iPhone or iPod or laptop into a stereo.
If you look on any iPod, or the back of a Mac mini, or the side of your Apple laptop you will see a round hole where you can plug in headphones. iPhones unto the iPhone 6 have a headphone socket as well. For later iPhones (the iPhone 7 and 8) you just need this adapter which turns your lightning connector into a headphone socket, and then the rest of this article applies to you as well. If you get a dock for any model iPhone including 7 and 8 it will also have a socket like this on the back.
The technical name for this socket is a 3.5mm or 1/8 inch stereo jack.
You can see one of these on the left of this iPod dock below:
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.
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