For €5000 you can't connect your state-of-the-art iPhone to your state-of-the-art Mac out of the box. You have to pay extra, and you have to carry around an awkward dongle adapter and hope you don't forget it! Fucking lol.
But that's not a cable that everyone has everywhere.
So many times around me poor iPhone owners couldn't charge their phones at parties because nobody had their kind of cable around, while for microUSB you've got plenty of helpful charger and powerbank owners.
To be honest, lately owners of phones with USB-C were having the same problem, but I guess it's gonna change faster than with Lightning cables.
I can now bring a single charger that can charge my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. I just need a USB-C to USB-C cable and a USB-C to Lightning cable.
Charge my laptop or charge my iPhone or charge both (use the laptop as a passthrough).
It will reduce the amount of stuff I carry, I tend to carry just an iPhone charger while traveling in case I want to bring it with me where I don't bring my laptop, extra space in luggage and weight.
Increases utility over what? If the ports all match, you can choose to carry 1 or 2 cables depending on whether you want to make 1 or 2 connections. Since the ports don't match, you need a cable for each type of connection you might want to make.
Can you plug this particular cable into a wall adapter iOS charger? If not, then you still need two different cables depending on whether you want to charge from the wall or the mac.
Ok, great. Then let's all go back to 2001 and use 10Mbps first-generation USB for everything. Oops! It won't supply enough power, it's now FOUR THOUSAND times slower than modern interfaces, it can't drive monitors, etc.