4 ways to take advantage of your iPad’s USB port (that aren’t power)

Back when iPads still used Lightning ports, there wasn’t much point in connecting anything to an iPad that wasn’t a charger or a keyboard. There were software gaps, yes, but Lightning alone created a lot of barriers. It couldn’t supply much power in the opposite direction, and data speeds were capped at 480Mbps. That might sound fast relative to your internet connection, but it’s glacial for flash storage. Consider that if you wanted to copy 64GB of media, it would take almost 18 minutes, never mind the hundreds of gigabytes of files you might have on your hard drive.