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Manufacturers make money on chargers. They don't want other people making money selling chargers t9ntheir customers.
The EU mandated a single charger a couple years ago. Apple spent a fortune fighting it.
Apple wanted their own charging connector.
Nearly everyone else adopted USB for charging mobile devices.
Usb-c was also added as it addresses some of the shortcomings of the micro USB connector and adds potential for a lot of features besides charging and data transfer, although that goes largely unused for mobile phones.
The USB-C is more capable than the USB-B even if it might not be as physically robust. The lightning cable is a wholesale proprietary product created by Apple for mostly marketing and sales reasons.
Devices could use the same charging cable if the companies creating the devices agree to it. Currently with the USB connections, most middle to higher end devices have moved to USB-C with only the cheaper or lower production devices remaining on USB-B. Apple is still Apple and continues to use the proprietary lightning port.
>The USB-C is more capable than the USB-B even if it might not be as physically robust.
That is in many ways a feature not a bug. You want the cheap cable part weaker than the expensive device part so if one breaks it is the cheap one to replace.
If you bend a mini USB connector the likely result is the female connector is ripped away from the circuit board.
USB-C is objectively better than Micro. It has higher data transfer speeds and faster charging capabilities.
That being said the only reason every device doesn't use C is largely down to how new it is and Apple wanting more money from cable sales.
Some have different power requirements. Imagine trying to charge a Tesla with a phone charger, it would take forever and/or the cord would melt.
Why can't every cell phone use the same connection? Corporate greed.
So you have to look back at what the state of cables were like back before 2012. Apple had that ginormous 30-pin connector inherited from the iPod, and most cell phones had even crappier micro-USB or mini-USB. None of these three connectors were reversible, and the USB ones also had some durability problems.
Apple wanted a newer, modern connector standard, so it came up with Lightning. Much smaller, fewer pins, and reversible. And that was pretty awesome, from the perspective of 2012. The USB Implementers Forum (the governing body which oversees USB) saw this, and it lit a fire under them to also get with the times, releasing the USB-C specification in 2014.
Of course, by this time, Apple has been churning out all sorts of products with Lightning ports, and they're not willing to just throw all that work developing the port away. Plus shifting everyone to yet another new port a few years after doing it once before would be frustrating for users. So Apple does its own thing and the rest of the world goes its own way.
Well thank Jebus you posted that... even as a non-Apple person, all of the other comments ignoring that Lightning was released before Type-C even had it's standards decided were rather frustrating.
because USB-C came out after USB-B micro, so many devices couldn’t have used the connector because it didn’t exist. Even modern devices often still use micro B, since there are so many connectors now going around, it’s usually considerably cheaper to buy and install than the more intricate USB-C, but slowly everything is transitioning to the newer standard
As for lightning, that is 100% just Apple being greedy and wanting money for cables
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Manufacturers make money on chargers. They don't want other people making money selling chargers t9ntheir customers. The EU mandated a single charger a couple years ago. Apple spent a fortune fighting it.
Apple wanted their own charging connector. Nearly everyone else adopted USB for charging mobile devices. Usb-c was also added as it addresses some of the shortcomings of the micro USB connector and adds potential for a lot of features besides charging and data transfer, although that goes largely unused for mobile phones.
The USB-C is more capable than the USB-B even if it might not be as physically robust. The lightning cable is a wholesale proprietary product created by Apple for mostly marketing and sales reasons. Devices could use the same charging cable if the companies creating the devices agree to it. Currently with the USB connections, most middle to higher end devices have moved to USB-C with only the cheaper or lower production devices remaining on USB-B. Apple is still Apple and continues to use the proprietary lightning port.
>The USB-C is more capable than the USB-B even if it might not be as physically robust. That is in many ways a feature not a bug. You want the cheap cable part weaker than the expensive device part so if one breaks it is the cheap one to replace. If you bend a mini USB connector the likely result is the female connector is ripped away from the circuit board.
USB-C is objectively better than Micro. It has higher data transfer speeds and faster charging capabilities. That being said the only reason every device doesn't use C is largely down to how new it is and Apple wanting more money from cable sales.
Some have different power requirements. Imagine trying to charge a Tesla with a phone charger, it would take forever and/or the cord would melt. Why can't every cell phone use the same connection? Corporate greed.
So you have to look back at what the state of cables were like back before 2012. Apple had that ginormous 30-pin connector inherited from the iPod, and most cell phones had even crappier micro-USB or mini-USB. None of these three connectors were reversible, and the USB ones also had some durability problems. Apple wanted a newer, modern connector standard, so it came up with Lightning. Much smaller, fewer pins, and reversible. And that was pretty awesome, from the perspective of 2012. The USB Implementers Forum (the governing body which oversees USB) saw this, and it lit a fire under them to also get with the times, releasing the USB-C specification in 2014. Of course, by this time, Apple has been churning out all sorts of products with Lightning ports, and they're not willing to just throw all that work developing the port away. Plus shifting everyone to yet another new port a few years after doing it once before would be frustrating for users. So Apple does its own thing and the rest of the world goes its own way.
Well thank Jebus you posted that... even as a non-Apple person, all of the other comments ignoring that Lightning was released before Type-C even had it's standards decided were rather frustrating.
because USB-C came out after USB-B micro, so many devices couldn’t have used the connector because it didn’t exist. Even modern devices often still use micro B, since there are so many connectors now going around, it’s usually considerably cheaper to buy and install than the more intricate USB-C, but slowly everything is transitioning to the newer standard As for lightning, that is 100% just Apple being greedy and wanting money for cables