Unlike Apple’s all-plastic version, the USB and Apple-licensed Lightning plug housings are made from really solid-feeling, attractive metal, tapered to nearly the same ultra-case-compatible thinness as Apple’s.

Second, you can choose from handsome gold metal with white cabling, silver metal with white cabling, or a black-cabled gray metal that’s somewhere between Apple’s slate and original space gray in color. 

And finally, a Velcro tab is permanently attached between the connectors, wrapping around itself to manage the resilient-feeling cable’s length. This feature is quite rare for a Lightning cable, and preferable to the coiled cables we’ve tested.