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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Firewire was a speed/feature innovation. Lighting was a port innovation. Pay to play in either case.

Other options available to Apple instead of Lightning:

* stick with the iPod connector for longer

* switch to micro-USB

* never invent the iPod connector in favor of staying with Firewire or going to mini-USB and then switch to micro-USB or something else later anyway

None of these are better. I'm EXTREMELY glad they didn't switch to micro-USB. I had no shortage of mini-USB and then micro-USB devices and the micro-USB ports/cables are pretty much the worst I've ever dealt with.

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Yeah. Also as I understand it, Apple is part of the USB committee and they were actively involved in the development of USB-C. Their experience developing the lightning connector actively led to usb-c being reversible.

If not for the lightning connector, we wouldn't have usb-c as we know it today.

Its also a stretch to claim apple doesn't like usb-c given how hard they've been pushing it on their laptops. In 2016, they started shipping laptops that only had usb-c ports - which worked around the chicken-and-egg problem we would have had otherwise. Dongle-gate was a real thing that annoyed a lot of people. But my desk is covered in usb-c peripherals - and that might not have happened if not for apple's "brave" choice.

The same thing happened with the original USB. Windows machines, even laptops, shipped with serial and even parallel ports for years after the first iMacs went all in on it. That gave the market for USB devices an enormous boost.

Without that, USB might have died.

People have really bad memories of Mini- and Micro-USB, or aren't old enough to have experienced that era. Those things were fragile. At that point in time, it made all the technical and business sense in the world to replace their existing proprietary connector with a new, improved proprietary connector. The MFi program was a thing before Lightning, it's still a thing today, and has nothing to do with the specific connector.

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