It’s looking likely that the next iPhone will have USB-C instead of lightning, so I thought it’d be fun to speculate about how Apple will talk about the change.
More courage?
Bragging about transfer speeds, hopefully. 
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Our users love USB-C on their Macs and iPads (yada, yada, yada) and now . . .
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Here a few of my (fatuous) thoughts.
- We love Europe too!
- Still able to stick it in upside down!
- One plug to rule them all!
- Not backward-compatible; always plug-n-play!
- Out with the Boomers, in with Gen-Z!
- Not just for Android or Galaxy!
–
JJW
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Courage.
(And twenty more characters.)
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Interesting question!
I suspect they will only talk about the benefits at the launch but leave the media, retailers , YouTubers, podcasters and bloggers to point out that they were forced to do it.
It’s good to have a bad guy that other people open blame for doing something you’ve wanted to do for years.
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They will publicly thank the EU 
for taking steps to standardise the industry and for joining Apple’s efforts to reduce electronic waste. /s
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This 10000000000000%
I agree, no matter what they say the reason is regulation, not the end user.
It will be nothing short of a complete pain for most as we have lots of lightning accessories and cables. I for one never transfer anything via cable to my PC so it would offer no improvement, even if they went super fast.
It’s another good reason not to upgrade this year - I want to get more use from my accessories and do not want to generate unneeded e-waste.
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I’ll still need lightning for a while thanks to AirPods, keyboards, trackpads, and the like.
(Given their terrible life expectancy, I’d say most of my Apple lighting cables will fray long before I no longer need them… 
)
Still, I wonder if they’ll address the issue of no longer needing lightning cables. Maybe they’ll offer a recycling program along with trade-ins or something.
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I HATE this narrative. People will still be using Lightning in 5 years for iphones, iPads, Keyboards, trackpads and Airpods.
People keep fixating on those that will buy a brand new iphone 15, but there are hundreds of millions (if not billions) of devices which use lightning which are going to be around for quite a while.
Apple will probably still sell iPhone SEs, 13s and 14th for at least the next 12 months which have lightning (I can’t see them re architecting all of those models this year) as the EU only requires USB C for those devices released after the required date.
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I must be doing something right because I can’t recall ever having a problem with a lightning cable, Apple or 3rd party 
. Which is fortunate because I also need them for “AirPods, keyboards, trackpads, and the like.”
If I were a betting man I’d wager a shiny new quarter that Apple will not mention lightning cables but will announce all the accessories that will be available with USB-C.
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Maybe Apple will include a Lightning-to-USB-C adapter for those who want to continue using their lightning cables albeit at a slower charging rate. I wonder how many iPhone users still have USB-A wall power adapters for their lightning cables.
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I guess Apple would have moved to USB-C on iPhones eventually.
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Maybe/probably? But some pundits think Apple may have been trying to keep lightning until they could develop a buttonless/portless iPhone.
Personally, I’m thankful the EU “encouraged” Apple to switch to USB-C.
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I already have a mixture of usb-C and lightning on my Apple devices and peripherals. Forcing a change over time to one ubiquitous connection/power supply format is fine by me and everything usb-C has been coming for years.
One of the purposes of government (whether national, federal or EU) is to regulate and that’s to ensure safety, economy, inter-operability and commercial competition on corporations who otherwise might be tempted to cut corners or to weld the consumer into a closed system which guarantees high returns for a company at consumer expense. It’s done with everything from gasoline to foodstuffs because it is the only way of having an even roughly level playing field and to stop successful and dominant companies turning themselves into exploitative monopolies, which is an inherent temptation. Sensible, thoughtful and fairly applied regulation is good for everyone including the corporations. We’re learning that through some hard lessons in the UK where our government is realising that it can’t simply scrap “red tape” no matter how many slogans it spouted.
The tech industry was (and to some extent still is) like the Wild West, innovating so quickly that regulation could not keep up and attempts to regulate would have damaged innovation and there are thousands of equally innovative small companies no longer in existence because those who got an advantage used it to crush competition - sometimes by buying it out and sometimes by just putting it out of business.
I’m happy to be an Apple customer, but I welcome its wings being clipped to some extent. I don’t think that Apple always has my interests at heart in its decision making - just look at the iPhone and iPad app stores now so heavily dominated by the exploitative “in-app purchase to play” games model.
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It’d be neat if this news is connected to today’s announcements. 80-120GB per second.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-introduces-thunderbolt-5-standard.html
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Update: it wasn’t connected. We only got the legacy 10GBPS. Next time!
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Me too. If there’s one thing that has driven me mad about Apple it’s their proprietary cables. This reaches back at least to the original Mac.
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