Apple makes a few dollars on every MFI Lightning cable (going by the price difference between equivalent USB-C and Lightning cables from various manufacturers, articles on the internet and, more specifically, pricing googled for Apple’s proprietary C94 connector).
I’d also assume that more than one, probably about Lightning cables are sold per iPhone each year (mainly replacement cable purchases for existing users over the lifespan of their iPhone, but also users who use more than one charger at different places). As a very rough guesstimate, I’d not be surprised if it contributed about the equivalent of about 1% of their iPhone earnings (and feeling pretty confident in that order of magnitude).
👉 That easily makes for earnings upwards of 100 million of USD per year from Lightning cables.
Certainly a “rounding error” in the grand scheme of things.
But to bean counters like Cook, every little penny counts.
The hate Tim Cook gets on these forums is ridiculous. Assuming your numbers are accurate (which I don’t think they are, my guess is you’re overstating by about 50%, but I’ll give them to you), no, I don’t think the company that decided the chips available weren’t good enough for its phones so spent an estimated TENS OF BILLIONS to design its own chips is deciding that “you know what, we’re going to ship an intentionally worse product for the majority of our customers to save an extra $100m a year”.
And if you were right that it was all Cook or his lieutenants picking Lightening over a superior option for money, I think people inside of Apple would have absolutely leaked that. I think the far more likely scenario is there was a vigorous debate inside Apple every year about whether the time was right to switch and Apple was just more conservative than all of you when it comes to switching out the connector on its most important product.
Exactly. They mandated a connector that can - but does not have to - do to higher speeds as well.
That’s up to the implementation required by the accessory/peripheral.
And I’d argue USB-C is (admittedly, slightly) worse from a shape perspective that lightening. Yes, USB-C superior for data speeds, power, and interoperability with other products, but it’s not as good at its primary job, being a connector. Which is the one thing it’s supposed to do (and what most people use it for).
So when the majority of iPhone users ONLY use the connector to charge overnight, never plug anything else into the phone, when does it make sense for Apple switch over to USB-C? Probably when it’s ubiquitous enough that the benefit of it being used having multiple devices that charge with it outweighs the slightly worse shape.
Remember, Apple is estimated to finalize the design of iPhones 2 years prior to release. So, whichever year you think Apple should have switched the iPhone over to USB-C, subtract 2 years from that phone’s release date to determine when that decision was made. iPhone 14? Connector decided in 2020. 13? 2019. 12? 2018. etc. Maybe you do think USB-C was ubiquitous enough for Apple to make the switch in 2018 or before, but can you understand why, particularly after the reaction last time they switched (which was a switch to an actually far superior connector), they might be conservative about this?
At the end of the day, I don’t think Apple is ever going to be complacent enough to ship a worse phone to save “rounding error’s” amount of money. I think they’d raise the price before doing that. And if executives were doing that, I think Apple engineers would absolutely have leaked that fact to the press.
And all of this is immaterial to the fact that it’s, in my opinion, ridiculous to write what connector devices use to charge themselves into law in a fast-changing field like consumer electronics. But I’ve been over my reasons why I think it’s ridiculous enough that I’m not going to rehash it here. This post is already way too long
