[matwood]

Apple was clearly moving towards usbc (which they helped develop). Their laptops and iPad pros had moved along with the pro phones. To think the EU the reason usbc came to the iPhone is ignoring the clear path Apple was on. At best they put it in the rest of the phone line a generation early.

Any fight that Apple put up was performative and them not wanting any sort of precedence to be set.

[monocasa]

Their laptops never had lightning, so there was no "moving along". And iPad Pros moved because they're trying to create a product niche that people use like a laptop/desktop, but where Apple actually gets that sweet, sweet App Store money for all software on the device. In that niche, people expect actual expandibility to access stuff like large disk storage, and the App Store money greatly outweighs the patent money from lightning.

If apple had planned to drop lightning, we wouldn't still have rhe crappy USB2 controllers backing that port on those SoCs that would still would have been under development when the EU decision came down.