Yes. They did it with the headphone jack too. Nobody will switch to Android for either of those, in fact the more Apple-specific stuff the more lockin.

> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables?

Seems like it's more a matter of conveniently waiting until it's clearly some kind of explicit competitive disadvantage not to switch, or otherwise have their hand forced, rather than making their products worse.

That said, Apple makes their products worse all the time for a variety of reasons, it shouldn't be so hard to believe, and they also let their products stagnate until they may as well be discontinued, like someone who stops engaging in a relationship until you eventually break up with them.

> How much profit do you think they can possibly make with those cables?

A lot. I'd wager somewhere in the realm of a % of hundreds of billions

Yes of course. How much did the cables cost with replacements for fraing ones. Revenue is revenue, same as with consoles - main device is not the main income source, its the ecosystem and additional devices and services people buy and keep paying for.

This is business 101.

> “Apple came under fire … [for 30-pin]”

So freaking what? Since when does Apple care about what customers whine about? They didn’t actually give a flying fig when users moaned about 30-pin to Lightning, did they? Show me how they apologized or walked that back. Same for the headphone jack. Same for the one-port MacBook 12”. And the MacBook keyboard - until class action got them - they put that garbage in several generations of laptops! The point being, they could have adopted USB-C whenever they wanted to and let the whiners whine — they just didn’t want to.

Stop anthropomorphizing Tim Cook. Apple doesn’t do anything because they feel bad about customer complaints. Apple does things for profit. Profit only. If you disagree, may I point to their recent zeal to buddy up with DJT. Is that a principled embrace of that dude? Or are they just weighting anything that isn’t profit at zero and then making the rational decision from there.

> You think Apple is going to make the user experience on iPhones – a product that makes them hundreds of billions of dollars a year – to sell more cables‽

Uh yes, of course they would. They happily would do that.

USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.

No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.

Their own cables were the most fragile things ever invented. There's no reason for that other than selling more cables. And it's not just about revenue, it's about control/lockin.

It's striking, iPhones have always been top except for charging. They were always dead cause the cables were so unreliable and difficult to find. Finally that's fixed, rare thanks to the EU.