Apple’s hopes of barring knockoff Lightning cables purportedly dealt fatal blow

Apple’s quest to keep cheap knockoff Lightning cables off the market may have just been dealt a fatal blow. MacRumors reports that Chinese firm iPhone5Mod “claims to have cracked Apple’s iOS 7 authentication and is now offering new cables compatible with the upcoming operating system.” What makes this particularly intriguing is that iPhone5Mod’s Cyril Chang tells MacRumors that Apple won’t be able to work around its hardware crack unless it fundamentally changes Lightning cables’ hardware. We first heard about about iPhone5Mod last year when the company released its Flash Lightning Dock that reverse engineered the Lightning cable’s hardware and opened the doors for unauthorized vendors to sell their own cheaper versions of the cables.