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Yea the one that comes to mind for me would be the card swiper by Square and other companies. That thing is amazing for small businesses, especially mobile food

by TheGRS 10y ago

Yea the one that comes to mind for me would be the card swiper by Square and other companies. That thing is amazing for small businesses, especially mobile food carts. I'm starting to see many are moving over to the card reader however, which I'm not sure if that is lightning-based or not. Anyway, I think that is a great point. Smart phones need a good serial port for 3rd-party hardware. USB would work, but everyone uses a different standard. Is the lightning port any easier or more difficult to work with? I imagine there's some sort of cost to using a proprietary port like that as well.

throwanem 10y ago
> Yea the one that comes to mind for me would be the card swiper by Square and other companies. At the hardware level, that's a microphone. I don't see any a priori reason to imagine it would fail to work via the Lightning to 3.5mm adapter, any more than any other microphone would. It's less convenient mechanically because the connection is no longer rigid, which may make swiping uncomfortable, but that's the only drawback I see. (And a sibling comment mentions having seen Apple explicitly call that out as something which will keep working, so maybe we don't need to reason a priori here.)