Lightning has been around longer than USB-C and they've changed their charging port once in 20 years. That's a better history than every other mobile device manufacturer. Their most recent cable is a bridge between the eventual USB-C transition without obsoleting everyone's existing peripherals and cables.
It is also a proprietary connector, which contributes to waste by virtue of not being able to reuse cables from other devices.
I can understand that they didn't want to have customers upset that a dodgy third party cable fried their expensive Apple equipment, but the transition to USB-C can't come soon enough IMHO.
It is a proprietary connector developed at a time when proprietary connectors were still common, and the non-proprietary options (mini-USB and micro-USB) were much lower bandwidth, much more fragile, and still had the issue of "which way up do I plug it in??"
This meme that Apple loves to create bags and bags of arbitrary proprietary cables needs to just die. It's 100% FUD.
I don't have this problem, all my devices have had lightning connectors for years. I don't plan or want to leave the ecosystem and my cables have lasted quite some time.
Conversion to USB-C will cause me to throw away all my cables.
USB-C cables are an investment in the future. Apple helped design the USB-C (and associated Thunderbolt spec) and knew that they would inevitably be forced to switch to USB-C. The iPad came first (to make it "Pro"), but the writing has been on the wall since Macbooks started charging over USB-C. There were legitimately no benefits to using Lightning besides the licensing fees that they charged when people made Lightning-based peripherals.
Maybe for you, Lightning cables don't seem like such a bad investment. To me, it's an source of imminent E-waste. The Lightning port on my Magic Trackpad 2 is the only thing that makes it feel dated, and unfortunately the feature that will eventually make it unusable. There is literally zero reason this accessory should have shipped with the port.
There’s always new cable standards. Even if 100% of Apple’s products that currently use lightning switched to USB-C tomorrow, I expect I’ll still be using lightning cables for the next 5 years just on devices I already own; and further into the future at some point even after everything I have is on USB-C there will be some cable standard to replace that too.
It’s not like lightning is some obscure connection: there’s a good distribution of stuff out there using either Lightning, USB-C or even microUSB and this is still better than the mix of connector types that used to be more prevalent. USB-C is fine, but there’s nothing to evangelize and it’s not going to decrease the amount of cables in use at any given time, nor stave off cable replacements. It might reduce the amount of cables you travel with by 1, maybe.
Lightning is some obscure connector, though. It's proprietary and Apple directly controls the licensing for people who want to use it. USB-C is a component in a class of it's own, there are no royalties to be paid when you manufacture something with it. For everyone who isn't Apple, USB-C is a direct upgrade. That's just a fact of modern manufacturing, not a subjective opinion from an Apple pariah.
> but there’s nothing to evangelize and it’s not going to decrease the amount of cables in use at any given time, nor stave off cable replacements
That's the point of having a universal connector, though. The USB-C standard can be modified in the same way Thunderbolt can, and if Apple wants to upgrade/change USB-C then they can do it the same way they did in 2014. There are other parties involved in the development of hardware ecosystems though, so bringing Apple to-point is the only recourse we have for fixing the situation. If Apple doesn't like that, they should have shown more initiative upgrading their USB2.0-based serial connector.