The lightning port is just a thing to be different and incompatible with other things.
Yes it wasn’t true because back then there was no real standard, but Apple kept it despite the fact that its basically garbage because its not compatible with others.
idk if i agree with this. apple replaced the 30-pin connector w/ lightning in 2012, when the only other mainstream option would have been micro-usb cables which sucked ass then and suck ass now. lightning was great at the time not just because it was smaller than the 30-pin but also it was symmetrical compared to micro-usb
the first usb-c compatible smartphones didn’t start arriving until like 3 years after that, by which point there were already hundreds of millions of lightning-compatible devices and an entire ecosystem existing in the wild.
standards are great. pissing off your consumers again only a few years after a major transition, maybe not so much. but now after 11 years of lightning and 5+ years of usb-c being commonplace the bandaid is a lot easier to rip off
