It's hard to believe Apple's 30-pin connector has been with us for so long. Over the course of its near ten year lifespan--dating all the way back to origins of the iTunes Music Store--the proprietary 30-pin cable has served us well, dutifully connecting to our iPhones, iPads, and iPods with universal ease. Now it appears that all of that interchangeable charging and syncing has run its course.

It seems like there's a new iPhone rumor every day, but with the supposed release date less than a month away, the picture is finally starting to come into focus. Among the anticipated changes--thinner, lighter, larger screen, LTE--the most controversial is a significantly smaller dock connector that shrinks it enough to fit a headphone jack alongside.

If the metal ring inside the new iPhone's dock connector works like MagSage, it'll might for some foolproof plugging.

When rumors first began circulating that Apple was considering such a change, people in the know had the new connector pegged for 19 pins, significantly smaller than the current cable, but still likely around the width of a USB plug. Even Reuters chimed in with its own report, and for a while, 19 pins seemed all but certain, despite a flurry of leaked case photos that showed a connector barely as wide as the home button.

Now it appears that the new connector actually has 8 pins (9 if you include the metal grounding frame), and its footprint is so small, some third-party accessory makers might have to rethink their designs. (We couldn't get any to comment for this story, given its rumor status.)

"The (30-pin) connector was designed to make developing accessories inexpensive," said Kyle Wiens of iFixit. "For consumers, it's certainly a bad thing, because we've all got substantial investments in the technology, and now we've got to buy new accessories."

We don't really want to trash all of our old accessories, but that new connector might be hard to resist.

No one can be absolutely sure why Apple would be implementing such a dramatic change for the sixth-generation iPhone, but there has been plenty of speculation. The prevailing opinion, of course, is design, and if the aesthetics of the prototypes are any indication, its certainly an acceptable trade-off.

Chinese-language newspaper Apple Daily (which incidentally isn't all about our favorite Cupertino company) took some measurements and found that the new iPhone enclosures cut down on the thickness of the handset by 18 percent when compared to the iPhone 4S. That brings it to a most impressive 7.6 millimeters, about a millimeter thinner than the super svelte Samsung Galaxy S III and just half-millimeter thicker than the benchmark Droid RAZR.

But it might not be all about thinness. French tech site Nowhereelse.fr recently studied one of the leaked cases and found a metal ring inside the dock connector opening, suggesting a MagSafe-type connection. Apple's use of the magnetized power cable in its MacBooks is designed to quickly disconnect when yanked, thus "preventing the notebook from falling off its work surface," Which would no doubt be helpful with iPhones and iPads, too.

A displaced headphone jack isn't the only reason for the new connector--the new iPhone looks to be a heck of a lot thinner.

There's also the possibility that Apple will beef up the data transfer speeds of the new iPhone's connector, the most likely of which would be USB 3. Of course, this wouldn't necessarily require a pin change, but it would certainly make it easier for Apple to sell it.

An even easier sell--but far more of a long shot--is the addition of Thunderbolt. Last April, Apple was awarded a patent for a "reduced size" connector that "supports USB 3 and a quad channel of DisplayPort [Thunderbolt] ...  made to switch between the two types of signals," and although we haven't heard a single whisper of this making its way into the new iPhone, Apple's been known to surprise us with high-priced nascent technology in the past.

But Wiens isn't getting his hopes up. For one, he points out that Thunderbolt technology uses 20 pins; for another, "Each end of (a Thunderbolt) cable has a microchip in it … and I don't think you'd see that level of sophistication in an iPhone connector. The cost has to be relatively low."

In fact, Wiens doesn't think Apple will even supply an adapter to support all those old accessories, as has been reported by iMore.

"When they were talking about a 19-pin connector, I thought (an adapter) was possible; now with a 9-pin connector, I think it's less likely. … Knowing Apple, it's been nine years. They're usually pretty aggressive about cutting off legacy support, and so it wouldn't surprise me if there's no adapter at all."

But ultimately, Wiens doesn't see any cause for concern, as least as far as sales are concerned.

"There might be a little bit of whining up front, but I think people are just going to suck it up, upgrade to the new accessories, and that'll be that."