You would be able to buy a cable for $2 and share it with other phone users?
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.