Car analogy time. Users would be angry if your car could only run on Apple fuel, and drive on Apple roads, and were speed-limited based on what Apple thinks is safe.
The fact that we think this is normal for phones is crazy. And the longer we wait the more Apple fuel stations and Apple roads there will be, until there is no way back.
Apple in this analogy would be a subway. It runs on Apple tracks by Apple rules. If you live in the city, doing city things, you might never need a car, and the subway meets all your needs. If you have a car, you might never need the subway and think it just sounds horrible. The subway rider doesn't need to think about driving and doesn't want to. The driver thinks having to drive is a feature, not a bug.
I think you're trying maybe a little too hard to see this from a product/horses-for-courses angle, but the subway analogy doesn't make sense. Subways have very practical and technical reasons to run on their tracks and exclusively operated by professionals. AFAIK there's no subway out there that isn't a closed ecosystem, and it's unclear if there'd be any benefit to their passengers if they weren't.
OTOH we know tablets, smartphones and cars can operate in an open manner, and their users benefit from this. Apple choosing not to make such tablets and phones is similar to cars that could operate on any road and fed any brand oil, but Apple choosing not to for their own benefit.
A bus works just as well and satisfies your complaints. Many people neither need nor want the full flexibility of car ownership. Many people neither need nor want full control of their computer. Apple being a locked-down walled garden is absolutely a selling point for many of their customers.
Imagine your car would only let you drive on road approved by the manufacturer, obviously, for your safety. But then they would approve roads only if 30% of anything you paid for in that road would go to the car company.
Sounds stupid? Well phone manufacturer taking 30% of everything is exactly that to me.
Personally I don’t want a world where the government regulates and decides who is allowed to sell phone apps based on safety regulations. That system makes sense for gasoline though. I do want to be able to install phone apps freely though.
Eh, I'm not convinced by the analogy. Phones don't run on fuel (and you can recharge a phone with any electricity supply), iPhones will run on more or less any phone network (which is as close as I can think for the road equivalent).
The speed limit analogy I can sort of see if I squint and I think highlights the reason people buy Apple: they want simplicity in their life. They don't want to monitor the speed limit for every road they drive down, they just want to know that if they're driving they're doing so at the recommended speed and won't end up getting a ticket (or crash!) because of an unnecessary choice (speeding).
Of course if we extend the analogy further: if it's a car then the automobile industry is dominated by just two car manufacturers and they both exercise a level of control over what you can and cannot do with the car. And people need cars, so they make a choice between two suboptimal choices.
I was an Android enthusiast, bought a Nexus One the day it came out. Then a Nexus 4, then a 5. Did custom ROMs, the lot. Ended up switching to Apple for simplicity around messaging and FaceTime with family/friends. I haven't ever looked back, I can't say there's anything I miss. Except the notification system maybe.
> Phones don't run on fuel (and you can recharge a phone with any electricity supply)
That analogy would be the charging port. Until the EU forced them to use USB-C, they refused to let you use anything but their proprietary (inferior) connector.
This is fiction. Apple co-developed USB-C, it's their tech, in particular the physical and electrical design in collaboration with Intel and HP (and Google and Microsoft on software drivers).
Changing connectors - after the 30 pin to lightning era - is a very annoying and wasteful thing where they and their customers wanted to wait as long as possible to do. On the other hand, Apple is legendary for pushing users to new ports far faster than the market is ready for them - original USB in 1997, and USB-C on laptops in 2015!
It was non-customers and competitors that pushed for USB-C. Th EU's mandate may have sped this up by a single annual iteration at best. Lightning cables are still ubiquitous to this day.
> they refused to let you use anything but their proprietary (inferior) connector
Ah, the mask comes off!
The thing is, people who actually used lightning widely agree that it is better than USB-C. The tactile click is just miles better, to name just one example.
Tactile click? Really? Weird hill to die. You're willing to accept inferior hardware, more ewaste, and a tighter grip by Apple for a silly little click?
The Lightning port is also incredibly physically robust. You can use it as a phone stand without worrying about damaging it. You can’t say that about USB-C.
My favorite part of how robust it was was how literally every single Lightning connector had the same pin burn out. USB-C wishes it were that consistent.
Speeds aside (we talking about charging) lightning was in every way superior to USB-C. Still is. I would rather have lightning-like connector replace USB mess, but have to settle on USB-C.
I know this is the common wisdom (especially around these parts), and yes, I know the timing lines up, but I'm not convinced. Apple was actually on the USB-C steering committee, and they adopted USB-C as the One True Standard for Macs years before PC makers went whole hog on it. (One can argue they did it prematurely, or at least too aggressively, but that's a different post.)
So what's another explanation for sticking with Lightning so long?
1. When they changed from the original giant stupid fragile dock connector to Lightning, which was obviously a better connector, people screamed at them. A lot. For a very long time. It was all just a plot to make people buy new proprietary cables, you see. If USB-C had been fully finalized even a year earlier, they'd have probably gone with that instead of Lightning, but it wasn't, so they couldn't. Nerds like you and I might say, "Great, but why didn't Apple switch as soon as USB-C was widely available," to which the answer is: just try and imagine the shit they would get if they made people buy all new cables, again, just a few years later. Not gonna happen.
2. Your parentheses around "(inferior)" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The two connectors are very similar conceptually, and have slightly different tradeoffs: a Lightning port is thinner than a USB-C port, but USB-C's design puts the spring pins that actually make the connection in the cable rather than in the port, which is probably a better idea. Even so, it's not as if USB-C is just overwhelmingly superior to Lightning the way either of them are compared to, say, the original giant stupid fragile dock connector. There wasn't a whole lot of pressure to switch quickly.
3. Having said that, switching over time made technical sense, particularly once the Macs started going all-in on USB-C. There's no convincing reason the rest of Apple's devices wouldn't have followed suit eventually even without external pressure. Yes, "but they make more money by being proprietary," but counterargument: c'mon, the amount of extra money Lightning brought in was loose change in the couch cushions on Apple's scale, and they knew full well that people were going to buy USB-C cables from them at inflated prices at the same time they were buying their iPhones/iPads anyway. They are literally making up the difference, and more, in volume.
The fact that we think this is normal for phones is crazy. And the longer we wait the more Apple fuel stations and Apple roads there will be, until there is no way back.