Elevation Dock plans to provide iPhone 5 update →
We will be designing and making a bolt-in swappable mount for the new cord as soon as we can get our hands on a sample.
If I’m understanding this correctly, is their plan to just take an Apple Lightning-to-USB cable and find a way to mount it upright in the base?
That could end up being a pretty bad hack, but it might work. And how much will it cost? Apple charges $20 for the cable, and Elevation Labs presumably can’t give away the mounts for free, so is it going to end up costing $40 or more to upgrade this $60 dock?
The alternative — licensing Lightning from Apple and making a complete “native” mount — would probably cost more and take much longer.
Regardless of which approach they take, we don’t know when we’ll actually have working iPhone 5 mounts, or whether they’ll run out of money or motivation and abandon the upgrade. After all, Elevation Labs still hasn’t sent out all of the Elevation Docks to Kickstarter backers from February, and they really don’t know — they can’t know yet — how difficult or feasible a conversion kit will be.
My wife and I like our Elevation Docks, and I’m glad I got to use mine for about two months before the iPhone 5 arrives. But I wouldn’t have paid $60 each for them had I known that they’d arrive so late. I just hope they become useful to iPhone 5 early adopters, exactly the kind of people who’d buy a $60 dock on Kickstarter, very soon.