It's not like switching to USB-C will be any great technical feat for Apple. There is already USB-C on the iPad, and the iPhone is just a smaller iPad. It won't even cost anything: they are going to need to reconfigure their production lines anyway for whatever other changes they make in that generation.
It's costing Apple probably tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue from Lightning cable/connector sales and MFi licensing fees to other vendors.
At the same time, Lightning has been getting a bit long-in-the-tooth (USB2.0 speeds are impractical for making local backups of iPhone photo libraries) - as much as I want to believe that Apple would have switched the iPhone over to USB-C within a few years, I realise it's equally possible they'd have introduced a "Lightning 2" or similar.
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There are still rumours out there that the iPhone 15 could be port-less in Europe, and so only charge via Qi - which coincides with Apple actually increasing the physical spec gap between North American vs. East-Asian models of iPhone for example (e.g. no SIM tray in NA vs. but people in SE Asia get physical dual-nano-SIM trays - and still no return of the headphone jack.
> Lightning has been getting a bit long-in-the-tooth (USB2.0 speeds are impractical […])
Lightning actually already supports USB 3.0, but Apple have only ever used that for supporting external accessories on some iPad models… models which now use USB-C instead, I think.
