They sort of tried to let FireWire be a standard, and it never caught on. So for lightning, they didn't bother. Sounds like the learned their lesson about making standards.
USB-C is kind of a big mess. Reversable connector is nice, but power is wonky, alternative nodes are wonky, everybody wants to add more alternative modes to the point where the only thing universal about it is the conbector (and usb 2 compatibility)
I'm reasonably sure they'll switch either to USB-C or something they find even better (which could very well be inductive charging only, no connector), but there were plenty of rumours about adopting all flavors of usb before they switched to lightning too.
What do you mean? FireWire wasn’t widely adopted in the consumer market, but who cares? Most digital video cameras at the time supported FireWire as well as laptops from Sony and the higher end laptops from Dell.
There wasn’t any dirth of hardware for people who needed it and where it made sense.
And cable boxes used to be required, by law, to have firewire connections. I used that little loophole to request a different cable box from Comcast, then shoved the Firewire plug into a MacBook so I could record TV on it.
(The firewire port was required because many early large projection HDTV sets had Firewire video ports and the FCC didn't want to suddenly obsolete millions of early adopters.)
Learn what? They've gone from near bankruptcy in 1997 to the the most valuable company on the planet in 2017, so it's not like firewire hurt them (or anybody cared much about it except some video and audio pros).
It was significantly faster than USB2 in practice. I sold my external FW drives not that long ago, was using them with a FW-Thunderbolt adapter for quite a few years ago.
USB-C is kind of a big mess. Reversable connector is nice, but power is wonky, alternative nodes are wonky, everybody wants to add more alternative modes to the point where the only thing universal about it is the conbector (and usb 2 compatibility)