Of course Lightning is better for Apple. It's going to make them gobs of money. That doesn't make it better for the consumer than microUSB.
What does this mean for the existing ecosystem of 30-pin accessories and the customers who bought into it?
Plugging in to your Kindle PowerFast adapter that only fast-charges a Kindle? Plugging in to a PMP that that supports USB-MTP or USB-MSP, which Apple doesn't support at all? Plugging in a HDMI or VGA adapter? Wait... they don't have those for micro-USB. Reusing your PDMI gear? Ooops, those are only pin-compatible with 30-pin and haven't gotten any real traction. Plugging into a USB audio device? Oh wait, THAT STANDARD DOESN'T EXIST EITHER.
So I'm begging you, tell me, my mind is OPEN on this: describe the benefit of Apple moving to micro-USB beyond "I can reuse my BlackBerry charger from 2005".
I can't come up with enough pros for anyone, including the customer.
Now fill the entire board up with Pros and Cons, then matrix that across Apple, Regulators, Carriers, Engineering, and Third Party Concerns. And then get back to me on what you think the correct answer is if your name is Apple and you have 200M customers to serve.
But if you are going to make ridiculous demands in lieu of argument, then you shouldn't really expect much of value in return.
So let's try again! Perhaps 4 out of 10 iPhones sold today are sold into the American market, where the 30-pin dock platform dominates. It's not a non-factor: compatibility with this platform was a key feature of the original iPhone.
Now we're in 2012 and Apple's gone with a similar but incompatible proprietary adapter for charging and media instead of an evolving global standard that has clear consumer benefits. "Why?" is an interesting question. "Because they're greedy gobshites" is an uninteresting answer.
Do you, ktizo, have some light to share?
[edit] Also, if I wanted to predict where this is headed, if all cable production can be brought in house, then why not go the whole hog and chip the cables [edit - I just looked up the spec, given that thunderbolt is an active cable, this has to be the direction they are headed], with some introduced functionality to sweeten the deal on the consumer side and then you can get total lock-in on peripherals, if you like.
Additionally, last week Chinese state-run news media reported that several vocational schools in the city of Huai’an, in eastern China, required hundreds of students to work on assembly lines at a Foxconn plant to help alleviate worker shortages. According to one of the articles, Huai’an students were ordered to manufacture cables for Apple’s new iPhone 5, which is expected to be introduced on Wednesday.
http://m.sltrib.com/sltrib/mobile2/54873765-218/foxconn-stud...
[edit] Also, the financial benefit to apple of doing this is not just in the sale of cables, but also in the control of licensing for third party peripherals, which it is losing a grip on as there are so many people geared up to produce their old connector. There is also a possibly huge lump of money from content producers if you can sell them the promise of being able to restrict the devices you can plug their content into.
From the consumer perspective, and I could be biased because I have a ton of apple's hardware, I see trouble when making a dock. From my experience with microUSB it's fragile, you can sway it by pulling not exactly right, you will have to aim every time you put something in dock. Where as with new connector you don't have to aim - it will slide in, it will easily slide out because of locking mechanism.
http://www.slashgear.com/micro-usb-formally-chosen-as-cellph...
Apple get around this by promising an adaptor for the european market.
Mandated standards can be useful if you want to waste less resources making duplicates of everything in slightly differing shapes. And consumers get to carry less tatt around and can borrow charging leads off each other and stuff. This isn't rocket science.
Micro-USB is used universally for charging and photo transfer, and in some platforms it's used for block-storage and/or file-transfer. On Apple's gear it's just used for the first two. So it's not as valuable for iOS customers.
Furthermore, Apple is in the unique position of also owning a dominant ecosystem of media devices that have nothing to do with USB, micro-USB, or any variant thereof. They have to service -that- platform too.
Umm... globally it doesn't, and most of it's market is outside the US, where it is forced to play ball to a degree by providing converters for those markets.
And if you think that consumer electronics companies have it harder than the space industry, then you are completely delusional.
Just because you don't hear about these things in the Magical Revolutionary Wonderful Apple bubble doesn't mean they don't exist. MHL to HDMI cables exist today and are usable today.
CEC, video, audio, DRM, and power over a single cable, with two physically and electrically compatible micro-USB implementations. Hrm.... I am intrigued. I'll have to think on this.
I hope companies start developing MHL compatible docks now that many high end Android devices are shipping with it. A good ecosystem of devices would prevent "improvements" like Samsung's from taking root. (obviously, Apple adopting it would have been enough to finally make one unified accessory ecosystem, but Apple can't charge exorbitant licensing fees for "Made for MHL" logos...)