As a giant tech company with so many influential products and lots of fans, Apple has long been known as a hard-headed one.
When the trends shift to something, Apple tends to stay on course and won't derive from its original thoughts. Even when wants to follow the trends others are following, Apple is known to be a late contender.
Apple devices have a long history of requiring proprietary connectors, and perhaps the most infamous is the requirement of having Lightning cables used with its iPhones.
While the vast majority of competitor devices use the standardized and the well-received connections such as USB-C, Apple remains stubborn, and kept on using its own specific pairing of port and cable.
And this time, instead of waiting for Apple to do what many people think it is supposed to do, Ken Pillonel, a robotics engineering student from Switzerland, took apart an iPhone X, and modified the insides of the first iPhone with a notch to home a working USB-C port.
To make this happen, and to make the iPhone to retain its charging and data transfer capabilities, Pillonel had to create a custom PCB.
One of the most difficult thing he did, was dealing with the chip inside the connector.
This was when Pillonel found an article on the web about how a Chinese citizen managed to hack the USB-C and switched it to work on Lightning ports.
He then went to Taobao online marketplace to purchase as many of the needed reverse-engineered boards as he could from China.
After having an agency shipped the boards to Switzerland, Pillonel "reversed engineered the reversed engineered" product to make his life "easier" because he didn't have to deal with the chip's underfills in the original C94 connector.
Pillonel then took his time to try and experiment with every single connection possible.
And after finally finding the schema, he created a PCB for it.
Pillonel also had to make sure that his custom PCB can fit into the iPhone X, by brainstorming how to squeeze all of the fabricated custom circuit board into the already-crammed iPhone X body.
And lastly, he machined a unique USB-C port on the bottom of the iPhone, in order for it to look like standard.
After all is finished, the modified iPhone X that has the USB-C port worked like intended.
It could charge, and could even send and receive data through the frankensteined port.
Pillonel documented everything, including all the processes, and even open-sourced the project on GitHub.
The open-source initiative should help others expand on Pillonel’s efforts, whether by creating more unique USB-C iPhone X versions, or applying the same concept to other iPhones models.
Pillonel then went to eBay to auction the one-of-a-kind phone.
The auction started at just $1. But at the end of the first day, the price skyrocketed to over $3,000. And that before the price further climbed to the tens of thousands.
Over the course of ten days, out of a total of 116 bidders, more than 30 bidders continued to fight to become the owner of this first-ever USB-C iPhone.
Finally, the auction ended with a final price of $86,001.
Pillonel guaranteed that the iPhone is functional, with nothing seemed out of the ordinary, besides the newly-redesigned port. Pillonel warned against restoring, updating or erasing the device. Further, he said the buyer should not use the heavily modified iPhone as their primary device and stipulated that its case should not be opened.
And not only that, as the iPhone X is already an outdated device, in the days where Apple is selling the much more powerful iPhone 13 series.
Pilloner said the motivations behind this project is that, "I just want an iPhone with USB Type-C on it. Why? Because everything I own has USB Type-C so it would be pretty neat to convert an iPhone too. Have one charger and one cable to charge everything.”
Pillonel said that he intends to continue working to improve elements like the USB-C iPhones’ fast-charging, waterproofing, and adding support for USB-C accessories.
It's worth noting that while the price went sky high, Pillonel wrote that the initial eBay auction was "heavily targeted by bidding trolls." He said that Bay pulled the auction after telling Ken to "secure the transaction."
Following this, Pillonel hopes to sell the phone again using cryptocurrency.
Read: The World’s Second-Ever Custom-Made USB-C IPhone Sold For $80k Less Than The First