Nobody required USB-C charging for laptops and iPads. It would have happened on iPhones eventually too.
When the iPhone switched to Lightning from the clunky 34-pin iPod connector, a whole lot of people got pissed off with Apple and stayed pissed off with them for years. Literally years. People were convinced Apple did it just to sell more cables. So if you're Apple, and you know the history of the last time you forced everyone to buy new cables, and now you have orders of magnitude more people using your phone…you probably put this off as absolutely long as possible.
Would they have gotten there without pressure from the EU? Honestly, I think so -- I used to agree with you, but when the iPad Air, not just the Pro, went to USB-C, I changed my mind.
10 years later, almost on the dot, they replaced Lightning on the iPhone with USB-C.
Doesn't seem weird at all to me.
The more you think about MFi and Lightning design patents the harder it is to believe that they were simply being honest and sticking to their word.
Do not try and pretend that USB was any good when Lightning was announced. And even USB-C is a mess of conflicting and confusing optional specifications.
Certainly one that Apple didn't struggle to navigate, considering they designed Thunderbolt around the specification.
Later Thunderbolt is Intel doing the right thing: they took many of the features that USB-C lists as optional, and made them required for Thunderbolt specification. That's why the first M1 Macbook was Thunderbolt-capable/enabled, not fully Thunderbolt certified
In the history of technology, Apple has chosen to switch connectors countless times. Every single time people complain, and every time Apple has the same exact reason for choosing a specific connector: its the one that makes sense for its customers when the device is released.
Maybe we're still waiting for that one to make "sense for it's customers when the device was released". Good grief.
I'm always unsure about this because it only supported USB 3 host for one specific accessory, the camera adapter. I question whether that implementation was just a hack or something that could've scaled to proper USB client support and others.
There was never a USB 3 Lightning to USB-A or USB-C cable.
They did not want to standardize. The idea of forcing them didn't come up in any significant way until after they proved that.
And I don't know what their laziness about USB 3 is supposed to prove. They didn't consider 3 support necessary for USB-C either.
Nobody said that happened. I said for phones.