> the lightning connector itself is better than the usb-c connect in my opinion. I get that having the pins on the male* plug is a theoretical advantage in durability but that has not been my experience with usb-c connector durability on either end.

I always end up picking a lot of dust out of my usb-c ports on my phones; or otherwise the port wears out and disconnects before charging completes. (Right after my wife entered the hospital in labor, I needed to scrounge around for something to clean out my phone's port because the "go" bag only had a wired charger and my phone wouldn't charge on it.)

It's why I went to a wireless charger for daily use.

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I'm real curious why lightning never became the standard. Was Apple trying to keep it proprietary? Was there a half-hearted attempt to open it up or otherwise convince the Android ecosystem to use it?

I have not used lightning but I have found USB C to be much more fragile than USB A, although better than mini and micro. I would really rather have had evey thing be a few mm bigger and stick with A.

That's fascinating; I've only had positive experience with USB-C cables and terrible with Lightning. What kind of cables do you commonly use?

Couldn't be further from my experience. They would always eventually stop connecting.

I didn't mention the single cable for everything advantage, that goes without saying.

I've also had basically zero issue with Lightning connectors, but had a constant battle with USB-C of every kind to figure out what's charging, what's data, what's PD, and so much more hassle.

I don't get why Apple was forced to colonize by the EU when they had the market-leading connector in place for significantly longer than USB-C even existed.

"It's only USB2!" Does it have to support the faster USB3 speeds? Not really... we don't have to keep forcing everything to include the latest kitchen sink support.