Exactly. Could you imagine buying a home if the electrical outlet wasn't standardized? (In the US). Just ask the rest of the world how frustrating it is when every country has their own plug.
True, but the people living in them don't. People in the US move, and they move a lot.
Please use the downvote button for comments that are not relevant to the discussion, not as the "I disagree" button. We aren't reddit. My point is factual, 26 million Americans move every year. The challenges and hassels would be comparable if we had different plugs for all our appliances and electronics are analogous to the problems we have with different standards for charging ports on our cell phones, just a larger scale.
As analogies go, try to go for the spirit of the comparison, not the specifics.
Imagine what the market for appliances would look like if we had to accommodate for different outlets. Imagine if your kitchen aid stand mixer you bought for 600 dollars wasn't compatible with the apartment complex you wanted to move into. Or your iron, or your tv, or your charger for your laptop, or your hair dryer.
It's a bad analogy, though. For one, USB isn't very standardized either. There are many USB standards and we're in the midst of a transition from Micro USB to USB-C that will create the exact same compatibility problem for at least a few years as Micro-USB and Lightning. Before Micro-USB we had mini-USB. None of these are even remotely backwards compatible. Meanwhile we've been using the same basic electrical outlet for decades, and it's backwards compatible with the one we used for decades before that.
Also, my oven is actually an entirely different plug from my TV, and my dryer is different still. My lightbulbs connect through a totally different interface that doesn't even look like a plug! I actually seem to be doing okay with that.
You are picking the extremes to show why my analogy isn't good, which is unfair. You don't move your oven with you when you move, and washer/dryer is rare, but 220 volt outlets are standardized in the US as well. If you are moving your washer and dryer with you, and oven, the place you are moving to will have standardized 220v plugs. There is a physical limit on how much electricty certain plugs can handle. The bulk of the consumer and kitchen appliances you take with you use the same plug. Micro-usb is pretty much ubiquitous for the vast majority of non-Iphones. The point is because of Apple continuing to "move us forward" we will never have something to standardize around.