So Apple (and by extension every other company) should follow the industry standard?
EVERY OTHER major company making smartphones is using Micro-USB. Apple is the only one who's not. I could understand rolling forward the 30-pin dock connector, which was created before Micro-USB was ubiquitous, just because of the shear number of cables and devices that use it, but anything other than those two is just plain ridiculous. It might be the best engineering in the world, but that doesn't make it cross-compatible with what's already out there in the world.
It's not a POS. The world is not standardizing on Micro-USB. There are plenty of connectors that exist in the world, some you have never even seen before. why you need more than one cable is beyond me when you've made it clear you just sync and charge. If you had a car or something, then I'd understand why you'd want more cables. By the way, your logic is quite faulty. When the dock connector was first used, NO ONE had a dock cable. Except Apple. Over the course of almost a decade, lots of manufacturers have been making them which in turn trimmed down the costs. And since people have been buying iPhones, iPods and iPads, the dock connector becomes more ubiquitous. But this wasn't always the case. Think before you type/post.
It is a TOTAL POS. You can't even buy a second charger cable for an iPhone right now. I currently have 4 dock cables that my iPhone can plug into:
1. Home charger
2. Car charger
3. Work charger
4. Home sync
I could easily replace that with Micro-USB. But not lightning. Should my phone be dead at the end of the day because the ONLY lightning cable I own is at home, and I'm at work? I don't think so. Even if I didn't have a charger at work, tons of people have chargers with dock connectors, and many others have micro-USB.
Pot, kettle. You're here whining about not having microUSB.
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If it's a dealbreaker for you then switch. If not, deal. No one's forcing you to buy Apple and ranting here accomplishes nothing. If enough people vote with their dollars Apple will notice the drop in sales. As stated above, your actual issue is with the EU and you need to take your complaint to them.
No, you don't. And there's no problem with not geting the dock connector. Not everyone does. No solutions are ever one-size-fits-all. What is a problem is expecting Apple to cowtow to your specific preferences when there has been no reason or precedent for them to do so. The reason for the dock connector is a dead horse that has been beaten to dust in countless prior threads and isn't worth rehashing for the n+1th time.
I'll keep my 4S for a while. It's good for at least a couple more years. Then, I'll assess the situation, and figure out what to do.
MY SPECIFIC PREFERENCES? Are you INSANE? NO ONE asked for a proprietary connector that doesn't work with ANYTHING ELSE. You can have good reasons for arguing keeping the 30-pin dock connector vs. switching to Micro-USB all day, and both sides will have perfectly valid arguments, and quite frankly, either one would be fine for me, but no one can have a valid argument for making up some new BS connector that has never been used before, when there is already a global standard, and the widely-adopted, if proprietary, 30-pin dock connector.
There is no reason other than that Apple likes proprietary crap without giving any regard to the larger consequences of proprietary crap.