The Lightning charging situation is a really unfortunate signal. I'd seen the Beats Flex announcement a few months ago where they discontinued the Lightning ver

The Lightning charging situation is a really unfortunate signal. I'd seen the Beats Flex announcement a few months ago where they discontinued the Lightning version and made the new ones use USB-C, and figured that meant they were planning to phase out Lightning in favor of USB-C and MagSafe. With these using Lightning instead of USB-C, that's obviously not the case. So now if you've just bought an iPhone 12 and picked up a $40 MagSafe charging cable to go with it, you can go get the Lightning cable back out of the drawer because you're going to need it again for at least the lifespan of these headphones. With the Qi charging case for previous AirPods (the various earbuds versions) they can charge off the same MagSafe cable as the phone (though without a magnetic connection for now). Maybe Apple wanted to put a MagSafe pad on one of the ears for these, but couldn't make the magnets work without interfering with audio quality? At the very least they could have gone USB-C, and then if you had an iPhone 12, AirPods Max, and an Apple Watch, you can charge everything using MagSafe Duo and a USB-C cable, which plugs into either the MagSafe Duo charger (for phone and watch) or directly into the headphones. But no, it's a Lightning port.