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The $1 Lightning cable that's still half as good as the real thing
How do you make an iPhone Lightning cable at a tenth of the price of what Apple charges? In short, you can't. Cupertino holds claim to the design patents, not to mention that there's an authenticator chip built into the cable, which means Apple can charge to license out the design (in turn bumping up the cable's base price). However, to avoid such licensing issues, Daiso (arguably the de facto 100-yen/dollar store in Japan) has substantially tweaked the Lightning cable you once knew. This means it's roughly a tenth of the price of the cheapest Apple-certified cable on Amazon, but well, it's also only really half the cable.
Japanese discount store gets into DS accessories
Daiso is a dollar-store-style retailer who sells extremely cheap goods under their own brands. You can get sushi-making supplies, toys, stationery, media storage, and beautiful Japanese bowls for, like, a buck each. If you happen to be near one of the locations (there are 9 in the U.S.; we visited the one in Seattle) it's definitely worth a quick browse. Especially now that the company has started selling DS accessories!We can't really predict what will be available in which store, but there's no reason to believe that these Daiso-branded silicone DS covers and screen covers won't be available in the majority of their locations. We're a little uncertain about the screen covers, but at 315 yen ($3) it's not much of a gamble. As far as the DS covers go, a silicone cover is a silicone cover, and Daiso's is less than $2.
