[bigyabai]

Not because their software would inherently break by switching to a different USB connector, or even by using a converter dongle. Apple signed this agreement because Lightning had a hardcoded DRM protocol baked into it to force third-parties to pay licensing fees. Of course they demanded a 10 year support window, it was a licensing ruse to make manufacturers pay a price premium to use the USB featureset.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MFi_Program

[rahkiin]

Not everything has to be a ‘i win, you lose’. It can be a strategy and architecture where multiple parties get something out of it. In different ways.

[seec]

The 3rd parties are not getting anything out of it. You literally pay for access to a tech stack that has nothing better than you would be able to do with USB. I mean the other side of connection was USB so it was a necessity anyway. If at least they upgraded the speed over the years, but nope stuck at USB 2.

For a hardware project I looked briefly at the MFi terms and they just don't make any sense. This is why any good lightning cable was always more expensive (at least before you get some from China with contraband auth chips)

Lightning is a major cash crab from Apple and revealed their actual playbook. Microsoft passed as a very bad players in the 90's but Apple is even worse. The only people not accepting that are deranged fans.

[vr46]

USB-C is a car crash of an implementation landscape, just because the interface is a single design, doesn't mean that you can rely on it. It is better than it was, but we've had several instances of issues with the USB-C, including my own personal favourite of my Nintendo Switch charging socket burning out because I used a non-Nintendo charger - an Apple one, completely compliant and as good as they get - to charge the Switch. A £50 repair.

Some USB-C cables aren't data compliant. They just send power. There's all kinds of foibles with USB-C that have taken years to work on and this just isn't clear to tech folks, let alone non-tech consumers.

The Lightning port has never done this to me, the device just charges and that's it. It transfers files and that's it.

[seec]

Don't get me wrong, I don't think USB C is perfect nor that it would have been my choice. In fact, from a mechanical standpoint, I prefer Lightning.

What I'm saying is that Apple didn't have to take a cut from every item sold by 3rd parties who wanted to use their specs. They could even have sold the spec at a fair price but instead they went on a full rent-seeking strategy.

This is why, when there is chatter about Qualcomm/Apple feud on licensing, I laugh my ass off because this is exactly the same behavior they impose on their partners. Can dish it out but can't take it. My complaint is mostly about the hypocrisy of Apple's behavior.

But the real motivator was making as much money as possible, the fact that their specifications had some desirable qualities is nice but not very relevant (since you don't get a choice if you wanted to make an iThing accessory anyway). Their previous port (30-pin) had the same problem and it was rather terrible. I had the first iPod with FW400 and they could have very well gone with mini-USB when they switched to their 30-pin to make it compatible with most PC who mostly had USB 2 and rarely FireWire. I used mini-USB for plenty of things from external hard-drive to digital cameras passing by digital mini-disc players and it was a fine port.

Yet they chose to make their completely proprietary 30-pin port, to rent-seek as much as possible on the accessory market. When they switched to Lightning, the goal was exactly the same, trying to pretend it's because it was better is disingenuous and very ignorant of Apple's history and behavior.

Plenty of corporations do things like that but the difference is that with Apple there is an army of zealots eating the bullcrap and justifying their behavior in a fanatical way.

[IncreasePosts]

You could turn lightning connectors upside down and plug them in before you could do that with USB

[MiscIdeaMaker99]

> The 3rd parties are not getting anything out of it.

Except all the profits from selling all those cables, connectors, and converters.

[seec]

They would have the same profit (in fact more) if they didn't have to pay a percentage of their sales to Apple.

The 3rd party manufacturers didn't make profit because of Apple but because of their customers choosing their products.

The way you try to reverse the situation and try to pretend Apple is entitled to a percentage of revenue from other companies making things to work with their products is pure insanity.

Do you think the brand of your car should get a cut of every compatible thing you buy to use with it? Should they get a cut on brake pad, tires, cables to their entertainment system, carpet of the right size for the particular car, etc. The list can be almost infinite.

Do you realize how absurd what you are trying to defend is?

[golergka]

> You literally pay for access to a tech stack that has nothing better than you would be able to do with USB.

Tech stack has the customers. You pay for access to customers.

[Dylan16807]

This is a relative comparison versus USB. If it was USB, it would have the same customers behind it (plus more).

[seec]

Best interpretation of that is rent-seeking. Not strictly illegal, but prone to regulation at the very least. Another way to put it is racketeering. I guess that Apple has been toying with the line for so long that people don't even understand where their interests lies...

[bigyabai]

Sure, FireWire is an example of Apple using innovation to actually innovate. Lightning is an example of Apple using DRM to paywall an ordinary and freely availible USB 2.0 featureset.

[majormajor]

Firewire was a speed/feature innovation. Lighting was a port innovation. Pay to play in either case.

Other options available to Apple instead of Lightning:

* stick with the iPod connector for longer

* switch to micro-USB

* never invent the iPod connector in favor of staying with Firewire or going to mini-USB and then switch to micro-USB or something else later anyway

None of these are better. I'm EXTREMELY glad they didn't switch to micro-USB. I had no shortage of mini-USB and then micro-USB devices and the micro-USB ports/cables are pretty much the worst I've ever dealt with.

[josephg]

Yeah. Also as I understand it, Apple is part of the USB committee and they were actively involved in the development of USB-C. Their experience developing the lightning connector actively led to usb-c being reversible.

If not for the lightning connector, we wouldn't have usb-c as we know it today.

Its also a stretch to claim apple doesn't like usb-c given how hard they've been pushing it on their laptops. In 2016, they started shipping laptops that only had usb-c ports - which worked around the chicken-and-egg problem we would have had otherwise. Dongle-gate was a real thing that annoyed a lot of people. But my desk is covered in usb-c peripherals - and that might not have happened if not for apple's "brave" choice.

[Someone]

The same thing happened with the original USB. Windows machines, even laptops, shipped with serial and even parallel ports for years after the first iMacs went all in on it. That gave the market for USB devices an enormous boost.

Without that, USB might have died.

[FateOfNations]

People have really bad memories of Mini- and Micro-USB, or aren't old enough to have experienced that era. Those things were fragile. At that point in time, it made all the technical and business sense in the world to replace their existing proprietary connector with a new, improved proprietary connector. The MFi program was a thing before Lightning, it's still a thing today, and has nothing to do with the specific connector.

[SllX]

The open alternative to 30-pin when Lightning was introduced was micro-USB and micro-USB is ass, but not switching away from 30-pin wasn’t an option for the phone they wanted to build at the time, that being the iPhone 5.

All in all, Lightning was a net benefit that overstayed its welcome by a few years. Even once USB-C was introduced a few years later, it took a few more years than that to become as pervasive as it did.

[musicale]

Overstaying its welcome was intentional to avoid burning peripheral developers who had been promised 10 years of compatibility after Lightning replaced the 30-pin dock connector, which was used from 2003-2012.

As noted in other comments, Apple was part of the USB working group, contributed to USB-C, and introduced USB-C/Thunderbolt-only laptops in 2016. There was backlash against this so they have since backtracked and reintroduced MagSafe and HDMI ports. Personally I would have preferred more USB-C/Thunderbolt ports.

[SllX]

No I get that and I know the history too; but that doesn’t mean it didn’t overstay its welcome as far as users are concerned. Speaking as someone that personally was never got hung up over the shape of the charge cable and certainly not for the flimsy e-waste arguments that were put forth: just in terms of transfer rate (at least on the higher end models) and device compatibility, USB-C has been an upgrade that users could have been enjoying 3 to 5 years earlier when USB-C was a bit more widespread.

[op00to]

I never paid more for a lightning cable than I did for any other usb cable. Why would I care?

[seanp2k2]

I haven't paid for all that many lightning cables period, since they tended to be included with most devices that needed them, and aside from some strain reliefs that I've added myself in the form of heat shrink, they've been largely reliable too.

[TylerE]

The issue I have with Lightning is that over time they tend to develop side to side wobble, to the point the connection becomes unreliable.

[Aaargh20318]

This was usually due to lint clogging up the port on the device. You could easily remove it with a toothpick and then everything was back in working order. Took just a few seconds at most.