the one place where it’s not USB C is the phone
My understanding is that they committed to 10 years of support for the lightning connector, which was released before USB-C became a thing. I can’t find a source for that, but it lines up pretty well with the timing of things (introduced in 2012, replaced around 2023), and I wouldn’t be surprised if they made a deal like that.
that’s a possibility, but i feel like that’s a really shitty excuse especially for newly manufactured phones, apple only just recently stopped shipping charging blocks with their phones, i believe they still ship cables though.
It’s like committing to funding 300 billion dollars of coal power plants, only to have natural gas become a big deal in 5 years and then pivoting to natural gas, i feel like it’s just, normal.
There’s more to it than just the cables, there’s all of the companies that integrate with their phones. There are a ton of accessories for iPhone, and they probably have contractual obligations to maintain compatibility for some amount of time.
and they all pay for the licensed lightning cable, they would love for nothing more than using USB C instead, apple doesn’t even have to stop producing lightning cables. They just have to stop using them on phones.
This is like the equivalent of not being able to manufacture a car because you slightly changed the design of how the transmission mounts to fix the problem where the transmission fucking grenades itself all because “well maintenance is hard”