Some points that many people are missing:
- All USB-C cables have wires for power/ground/cable detection etc. plus 2 wires for USB-2 signals. The USB-C standard (nothing to do with the EU) requires USB 2.0 as a minimum.
- USB-C cables that support USB 3.2/Thunderbolt 3/DisplayPort need to add eight more wires to support 4 lanes of high-speed data. USB C/2.0 cannot physically carry USB 3 or TB signals.
- USB-C cables that support higher charging rates also need thicker/more wires to carry the current.
- Thunderbolt-branded cables over 0.8m have to be made to higher standards and/or include active signal booster chips in order to support the full 40Gbps speed. For Thunderbolt 4 that's 2m, but I'm pretty sure that's down to higher (= more expensive) minimum standards for TB4-branded cables rather than anything magic about TB4.
So high-speed data
and fast charging in a single cable is going to mean a more expensive, thicker, stiffer cable, whether you like it or not. Heck, look at the photo of the alleged new cable in the article - its only 0.8m long and as thick as a pencil - OK for syncing your 4k raw video footage with your Mac but
really not what you want in an everyday charge cable.
The valid point of USB-C is that - for mobile devices - one hole in the case does it all. The idea that one
cable could do it all was always magical thinking - unless you only buy top-of-the-range TB4-certified cables for everything (and that's only been possible since TB4 - active TB3 cables were Thunderbolt-only - no USB or charging).
The upside is that because Apple are switching to
USB-C there's a competetive market for equivalent USB-C cables
from reputable sources or (if you want) Intel-certified Thunderbolt cables. With Lightning your choices were (a) Expensive Apple-branded cables, (b) Expensive licensed-by-Apple cables or (c) "do you feel lucky" bootleg cables. So, now, you can still have fun mocking Apple's cable prices, but you don't actually need to buy them. But, do compare like-with-like - I'm not defending the price of Apple's $130 TB4 Pro cable, but you can only compare it with other active, 2m, 100W, 30Gbps TB4-certified cables.
Oh, plus: Lightning physically doesn't have enough pins to
fully support USB 3.2, TB4 or full-bandwidth DisplayPort (One of the past iPad Pros could kinda sorta do USB 3.0 with the right dongle - later iPads have gone with USB-C) - so an iPhone Pro with Lightning and TB4 (which does start to become relevant for something that's being sold more as a portable video/photo studio than a phone) was never going to happen.
Going to USB-C makes far more sense than coming up with Lightning 2 (to be fair, there was no viable standard alternative back when Lightning was launched) - and the writing was on the wall once all the Macs
and the iPad Pro had switched to USB-C in order to support TB3.
All the EU is doing here is giving Apple a handy scapegoat to blame for making people replace their Lightning accessories.
