To be honest, Lightning was always dead in the cradle because of it's licensing fee. Apple tried to take the high road for so long, but vendors actively avoided Lightning unless they could buy bootleg, unlicensed connectors. Apple basically took a serial standard hostage, and then insisted that it was okay because they did it before USB-C was finalized. There's no way Apple didn't know from the offset that they were diverging from the standard and creating e-waste, they helped design USB-C. The creation of Lightning was an exploitation of 30-pin's depreciation.
The plethora of crappy, bootleg cables with USB-C connectors that are single purpose (power only, low-speed data only, etc) has created plenty of e-waste, in addition to confusion. I don’t see how this is an improvement over the licensing model, where you know every cable works the same.
You can put 12W through all USB-C cables as well (AFAIK). The crappy ones might be limited to something between 12-50W, while decent ones allow for 100W or more.
The licensed model failed. I own multiple gas-station Lighting cables with no data, only (5w) power. Ultimately everyone converges on the "fuck it, what's the cheapest thing on Amazon" mindset and licensing doesn't help.
The number of “USB-C” things I have that aren’t is infuriating. Won’t use a real charger or PD, only works with an A to C cable, only works when plugged in “right side up”, etc.
At least with Lightning and Micro-B you knew the score.
The good USB-C stuff is great. The rest is worse than B ever was.
While I get the point made in the article, I'd prefer being told "I hit a bull with my car. I'm ok, but the car is damaged" first, rather than having fed bits and pieces of info slowly, or worse, having to fish it out.
It's understandable for people to not be calm in this situation and struggle to explain things clearly, but it sounds like that wasn't the case here. So if you are calm, do the other person a favor and give a 10-15 second explanation of what happened instead of leaving them guessing.
