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Apple forced to ditch iPhone lightning charger
(www.bbc.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2023
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They first started using USB c on the macbooks in 2015. There's no way that it took 8 years to get it ready for the iPhone. In that time they've also released several other devices and accessories which have used lightning.
To me this doesn't point to a planned gradual shift over to USB c but one that was forced by neccesity on the macbook then by regulation on the iPhone.
The narrative around Lightning was always that they’d keep it for 10 years and then move to something new, Schiller even called it “a modern connector for the next decade” when it was announced, and at the time it was better than anything else on the market.
No one who’s been paying attention is surprised that Apple switched this year and not next. I’d love to go dig up my years old comments on Reddit about this but like many of us I deleted my whole history. I had hoped they’d advance the timeline and release the 14 with USBC because of the EU regs, but I’m convinced this was the plan because they waited for the lighting to fulfill its 10 year target (just like with the 30 pin connector) and not until the EU regs actually forced them in 2024.
When the iPad switched to USBC in 2018 it was a foregone conclusion that iPhone would too, and the assumption was always for it to happen in 2023.
How does it take 5 years to integrate the world's most popular and standardised connector?
Call me a cynic, but maybe they just wanted another five years of selling over priced cables and another five years of controlling another part of the "ecosystem".
I’m saying it was a choice to ride out the full 10 years with lightning, not a limitation. They tooled up for 10 years of lightning and they stuck to the plan.