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Comment by brundolf | Hacker News Reader

I was literally about to buy a 14 last fall, then the rumor about USB-C came out and I decided to wait another year just for that

Edit: Lol, eternally fascinated by what causes some people to downvote on here

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I haven’t owned an an iPhone or iPad since they dropped the 30 pin connector and headset jack to proprietary lightning instead of USB-C. I bought my first iPad once Apple finally adopted USB-C and I look forward to switching back to iPhone one the iPhone SE has USB-C. I refuse to give any company money when they are being egregious. It was a pure profit play, and I’m not interested in wasting my money on high margin, proprietary, lightning accessories that I knew would be sent to the landfill in due time. Apple held out a lot longer than I thought they would. It’s shameful really.

Nothing attracts downvotes like criticism of Apple. Their decisions are guided by the hand of the divine, so anyone that won’t follow is clearly an unworthy heathen.

> lightning instead of USB-C

An FYI, Lightning (released 2012) predates USB-C (1.0 specs published 2014) by a couple years. I'm unclear on how Apple was able to choose Lightning instead of USB-C given that timeline.

They were on the working group, they could have done a USB-C like connector. But I bet they wanted USB-C to basically be lightning and lost.

I agree that proprietary connectors are problematic but consider that Apple started selling Lightning devices almost 3 years before the first USB-C phone shipped. They couldn’t have chosen USB-C before it existed - and the industry accelerated that process due to how much better Lightning was than the older USB designs – but by the time USB-C was standardized and shipped, Apple had somewhere north of 300 million devices with Lightning connectors to support.

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