Admittedly, $5,000 is a lot to pay for a four-year-old iPhone (even one with a working USB-C port), so for anyone thinking about building their own, Pillonel also posted a video on YouTube documenting all the work he did to make a working USB-C iPhone, along with a link to an open-source repository on GitHub containing all the necessary files and info.
That said, this isn’t the kind of mod you can just whip up in a day, as Pillonel faced a number of challenges when trying to add USB-C to an iPhone including needing to reverse engineer Apple’s Lighting Connector, installing a custom circuit board, and even modifying the iPhone’s body to accommodate the USB-C ports slightly larger dimensions.
But in a time when the European Union is slowly working towards a mandate that would make USB-C the standard port on all phones, Pillonel’s project is so great because not only does it prove that an iPhone with USB-C is not a pipe dream, but that one day, iPhones and Android phones could share the same charging port in harmony without any real loss in performance or functionality.
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