> Until the EU forced them to use USB-C I know this is the common wisdom (especially around these parts), and yes, I know the timing lines up, but I'm not conv

> Until the EU forced them to use USB-C I know this is the common wisdom (especially around these parts), and yes, I know the timing lines up, but I'm not convinced. Apple was actually on the USB-C steering committee, and they adopted USB-C as the One True Standard for Macs years before PC makers went whole hog on it. (One can argue they did it prematurely, or at least too aggressively, but that's a different post.) So what's another explanation for sticking with Lightning so long? 1. When they changed from the original giant stupid fragile dock connector to Lightning, which was obviously a better connector, people screamed at them. A lot. For a very long time. It was all just a plot to make people buy new proprietary cables, you see. If USB-C had been fully finalized even a year earlier, they'd have probably gone with that instead of Lightning, but it wasn't, so they couldn't. Nerds like you and I might say, "Great, but why didn't Apple switch as soon as USB-C was widely available," to which the answer is: just try and imagine the shit they would get if they made people buy all new cables, again, just a few years later. Not gonna happen. 2. Your parentheses around "(inferior)" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The two connectors are very similar conceptually, and have slightly different tradeoffs: a Lightning port is thinner than a USB-C port, but USB-C's design puts the spring pins that actually make the connection in the cable rather than in the port, which is probably a better idea. Even so, it's not as if USB-C is just overwhelmingly superior to Lightning the way either of them are compared to, say, the original giant stupid fragile dock connector. There wasn't a whole lot of pressure to switch quickly. 3. Having said that, switching over time made technical sense, particularly once the Macs started going all-in on USB-C. There's no convincing reason the rest of Apple's devices wouldn't have followed suit eventually even without external pressure. Yes, "but they make more money by being proprietary," but counterargument: c'mon, the amount of extra money Lightning brought in was loose change in the couch cushions on Apple's scale, and they knew full well that people were going to buy USB-C cables from them at inflated prices at the same time they were buying their iPhones/iPads anyway. They are literally making up the difference, and more, in volume.