In the past weeks, I saw a new one in a multitude of images Reversible Lightning cable for iPhone 6, which can be inserted in any orientation both in a normal USB port and in iPhone 6, or any other Lightning iDevice. The idea of introducing that Reversible Lightning USB cable in any orientation in a USB port would reduce the time spent searching to find the correct orientation to insert the cable into the port, and a British newspaper thought to calculate how much time we save annually by using it.
We have not got the figures for the number of people who have bought iPhone 5S and 5C in the last year, but we do know that more than 150m iPhones were sold during the 2013 fiscal year, which we are going to use as a proxy here for the number benefiting. If we take the proportion of owners missing their USB points first time round (60%) and multiply that by the total number of seconds potentially saved across the year (4.5 seconds per user for the 365 days of the year) then the new double sided USB might save the world's new iPhone owners 147,825,000,000 seconds a year.
Based on calculations made by them for 60% of the 150 million iPhones sold in 2013 and the average time of 4.5 seconds required by a number of 15 newspaper journalists who tested the cable, it turns out that annually we regain 16 minutes using this accessory. The 15 journalists who tested the reversible Lightning cable on their own computers spent between 0.8 seconds and 8.6 seconds to connect the cable to a USB port, the average time being 4.5 seconds.
Even if these calculations do not have any scientific value and the period of time recovered annually is not large, I am sure that many users would like a reversible Lightning cable.
