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There were hundreds of devices on Amazon that never paid Apple a fee to use Lightning.

And as far as USB C on Macs, are you complaining that Apple used an industry standard port?

USB-C wasn't exactly standard when Apple put it in Macs. Nothing else used it yet, and they didn't have any transition period. Its sole purpose for years was to get adapted to other ports. And if you wanted to use it as Lightning, you basically needed the Apple cable.

You didn’t real need a transition, just USB C to USB 2.0 cords and USB C to HDMI cords.

Unless you had the MacBook with 1 port.

The video dongles never worked reliably, especially early on. The USB-A adapters were less bad but still annoying. The end result was that everyone bought docks. Same as how removing jack didn't result in people using dongles, they bought AirPods.

No, there weren't. Lightning cable have an authentication chip, and while it was cloned towards the end of the lifecycle, most accessories still utilized official chips.

I have been buying cheap knockoff lightning devices since my iPhone 5 at least. I can guarantee that random Chinese manufacturer wasn’t selling lightning cables in bundles of 5 for $10 using officially licensed anything from Apple.

Same here. They tended to stop working, not because of a shoddy cable but because the phone rejects it.

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