The dock connector, started back in the days when the iPod was firewire* and since the iPod charged over firewire on Macs but firewire ports on PCs were often u

The dock connector, started back in the days when the iPod was firewire* and since the iPod charged over firewire on Macs but firewire ports on PCs were often unpowered, Apple needed to provide a way for one iPod model to be plugged into both windows and mac machines. This was also before Apple gave up on firewire and went USB only. Further people have enough confusion hooking things up, so giving them a failproof solution is pretty ideal. People really do have trouble confusing video and audio RCA jacks, for instance. This single port has allowed Apple to transition thru dozens of product and models over almost a decade without having any compatibility confusion or hassle, and no special $20 adapters, etc. Compare this to the situation we've seen in the last decade with video ports-- and they only do one thing, yet there have been a half dozen different "Standards". What is most interesting here is the default presumption that Apple is doing this for proprietary "monopolistic" reasons. *though the first ipod had an actual firewire port, a later model which was intended for windows as well had the dock connector which supported both firewire and USB and Apple shipped different cables for mac and windows iPod users.