USB C is a huge downgrade from lightning. The lightning connector is far more robust. The little inner connector board on USB C is so fragile. I’ll never understand why people wanted this so badly.
The accurate comparison here isn’t between random low-budget USB-C implementations and Lightning on iPhones, but between USB-C and Lightning both on iPhones, and as far as I can tell, it’s holding up nicely.
I despise USB-C with all my heart. Amount of cable trash has tripled over the years.
I find it superior to both lightning and USB-C.
Given the sheer number of devices we interact with in a single day, USB-C as a standard is worth the trade off for an increase in our threat surface area.
1000 Attackers can carry around N extra charging wires anyway.
10^7 users having to keep say, 3 extra charging wires on average? That’s a huge increase in costs and resources.
(Numbers made up)
1) Surely the world conquering robo-army could get some adapters.
2) To the extend to which this makes anything more difficult, it is just that it makes everything a tiny bit less convenient. This includes the world-conquering robo-army, but also everything else we do. It is a general argument against capacity, which can’t be right, right?
That's not everyone wins. The people that actually bought these devices now have cables that don't work and need to replace with a lower quality product, and the people who were already using something else are continuing to not need cables for these devices. The majority breaks even, a significant minority loses.
Simply not choosing one cable to rule them all lets everyone win. There is no compelling reason for one size to fit all.
If some people like hip hop but more people like country, it's not a win for everybody to eliminate the hip hop radio stations so we can all listen to a single country station.
Further, rail gauge is not a consumer choice. If there were two rail gauges and your local rail station happened to have a different gauge than your destination, you'd be SOL. A different rail gauge may provide benefits for people with specific needs, but you don't get to take advantage of those benefits except by blind luck.
There is no such benefit from standardizing cable connectors. If someone charges their phone with the same style cable as you, you gain nothing. If someone uses a different cable, you lose nothing. There is no reason for anyone not to use their preferred cable which is optimal for their use case.
I'm sure there are more than a few people that would end up throwing out their perfectly functional accessories, only for the convenience of carrying less cables.
I don't want to ship another cable across the Pacific Ocean from China so I can have a cable that works on my devices.
I want to keep using them until they don't work and I can't repair them any more.
That is great you spent the money for this, but I'm not ready to throw away my perfectly fine devices.
On a specsheet basis it also charges faster and has a higher data transmission rate.
Lightning cables are not more robust. They are known to commonly short across the power pins, often turning the cable into an only-works-on-one-side defect. I replaced at least one cable every year due to this.
And... yeah, it turned out better than the standard. Their engineers have really good taste.
Instead Apple chose to make a good improvement on USB-C proprietary, and thus it will die like 8-track, betamax, and minidiscs.
Vendor lock-in is so big of a negative that everyone will pick whatever the least-bad open alternative is.