[Forgeties79]

They weren’t all-in or first because they refused to add them to their mobile products until years after everyone else. They fought tooth and nail against integrating it into the iPhone until the EU forced them to. It’s well documented. The MFi program - namely the associated accessories - was very important to them.

Putting USB-C on their laptops in 2016 is a different discussion and it wasn’t a tough decision because none of their computers had lightning integrated into it anyways. If anything we should be asking why they did that and then took 7 years to put them on their phones. They could’ve had one port for literally everything since 2016 and yet the EU had to force them to do it.

[stouset]

We know why it took seven years. For the same reason it took ages for them to replace the 30-pin: Lightning was good enough for what users needed (and was better along some axes), and users had prior investment in an ecosystem of Lightning devices, cables, adapters, and accessories. iPad Pro went USB-C in 2018, MacBooks in 2016. Apple was clearly sold on USB-C, they just had a stranded install base problem on the iPhone.

If you want evidence that Apple was going to move to USB-C anyway, consider that at no point after 2012 did they invest in improvements to Lightning. They never upgraded the protocol speeds, never pushed higher wattage charging. That’s not the behavior of a company that wants to extend a platform’s life.

When the EU forced the USB-C switch, Apple notably didn’t fight it as hard as people assumed they would. The EU handed them a smooth exit ramp on a platter.