[kiwijamo]

Excatly right. They switched to USB-C only on certain classes of devices and even then only over a incredibly long period of time when they could have moved all of their devices over to USB-C fairly quickly given their vertical integration advantages. It's interesting how my non-Apple ecosystem has me using USB-C across all devices across multiple manufacturrs but my Apple friends have multiple cables/chargers/etc to accomodate Apple's approach of using different standards across their own product lines. Thankfully EU has made this a thing of the past but if it wasn't for EU there'd be no change or it would have happened years from now.

[simondotau]

Perhaps it was EU regulation, or perhaps it was Apple wanting to make good on a ten-year-old promise of connector continuity. When Apple introduced the Lightning connector in 2012, they described it as their iPhone connector "for the next decade".[0] Their switch from Lightning to USB-C on the iPhone came just over ten years after that.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82dwZYw2M00&t=1571s

[MBCook]

Boy did they ever get hell when they left the 30-pin connector. I could easily see them wanting to avoid that whole mess again.

Honestly I am still blown away that the switch last year to USB-C was met with some positivity (often from tech people) and a bunch of ’meh’. I was expecting tons of screaming and “Apple’s making you buy all your cables again to juice their books!”