The App Store, the Lightning connector, two huge hassles that only exist to make Apple more money on top of the premium you already paid for the hardware. It's my device! I paid a premium for it!
> the Lightning connector
Lightning is the better-engineered physical connector. Quite-heavy phones can be held up on a charging cradle with 100% of the load placed on the Lightning connector, while this would destroy a USB-C connector. A Lightning jack is a solid piece of aluminum, plus two plastic bits on either side with wires running up them. It's simple and robust. The socket is equally simple.
USB-C — all of the USBs, really — give unneeded opportunity to catch debris inside the connectors and then force said debris into the slots, gumming it up. Lightning avoids this; the jack is designed to be completely flat+smooth+convex, so no debris collects on/in it.
The only reason USB-C doesn't just use a Lightning connector is spite. IIRC, Apple offered the USB Forum the Lightning connector patents if they wanted them, but they refused. Instead, the USB Forum copied what they considered the desirable features of Lightning — e.g. reversibility; but implemented them worse (with non-mirrored sense pins requiring USB PHYs to understand orientation); and then sought extra trouble trying to solve problems that people provably hadn't been having with Lightning (e.g. re-adding a shroud for the pins — presumably to protect from scratches/rust — when nobody has ever had a Lightning cable fail for this reason; where this design choice increased the failure rate of USB-C sockets. The cables are supposed to have the sacrificial side of the connection!)
Lightning also has that problem where the 4th pin burns out and now you have a cable that charges one way. I've yet to have that happen on a USB C cable.
I mean, from an engineering/repair POV, these sorts of short-term, user-correctable connection faults are a good trade-off for having fewer long-term, actual-repair-needed "junk getting in there and breaking something" problems.
See, on the complete opposite end of engineering robustness: the butterfly keyboard. The hinges in those things just loved to hoover in debris, and then ground themselves apart, with user repair (i.e. popping off the keycaps to get the debris out before it can break your keyboard) being "inadvisable" at best (i.e. likely destroying the hinges just as well as the debris would have.)
> Lightning also has that problem where the 4th pin burns out and now you have a cable that charges one way.
This is true, but it's due to the electrical design (sense and VCC right next to each-other), not the physical connector design. If USB-C had used a Lightning physical connector, they could have corrected this problem just by ordering the pinout differently.
I'd love to read more about this, especially since I also heard somebody claim that USB-C was based on an older Apple power socket.
Then when USB-C was available, Apple had only just switched connectors, and there were enough angry people when they switched away from the 30-pin connector (which had been in use for ~9 years) that switching connectors again after only a few years would have been a massive source of drama. They do seem to be slowly working towards a switch now, with USB-C showing up in iPads over the last few years, but I sincerely think that it'd have been overall bad for their PR to try to switch iPhones away anytime earlier than the last year or two.
The longer they linger now, admittedly, the more money-grubbing it'll seem.
You sure paid a lot for a rental. You cant even run your own programs on it, unless you pay $100/yr to them IN ADDITION TO "buying" the hardware.
I'm not saying this is great. Just that you were wrong. :D
(To be fair, this is a fairly recent change. 2019 or so, I think?)
If you think what you typed was somehow a "gotcha", its not. It just shows how stupid apple users are willing to defend their abuses.
If you have the $99/yr Apple Developer account that the user mentioned, those restrictions don’t apply.