Ok, lightning was both great and it's obviously overdue for replacement, but the timeline seems to be muddy for a lot of people, who just seem angry that two types of cables exist, or angry that they will have to use only one in the future, or just angry. That's fine, but as an elder of almost a half century in age, I lived through the transition and do hve a perspective. Please skip this tl;dr entry if you wish.
Lightning was great when it was introduced -- the iPhone 5 made the switch, and previous phones (and iPods, and accessories) were all the old 30-pin iPod dock connector. There was tremendous hue and cry at the time, wailing and gnashing of teeth, as people loudly lamented online that Apple was forcing everyone to buy newer cables after more than a decade of the old one which was fine and worked perfectly and didn't need to be replaced, etc etc. Apple would be milking their partners for that sweet MFI money -- and they would, of course. But they already were.
Yes, cables failed. None of mine ever have, but others in the family, and in my mom's case, exactly the same ways as the old dock cables failed -- usually where the connector was attached to the cable because people disconnect by tugging the cable out of the phone. Second hand cables were usually stronger and what I usually used and gave away as people's official ones failed. At the time -- this was the far off year of 2012 -- my most reliable 30-pin cable was one by Belkin or some other third party, and I got about a half dozen of the monoprice lightning cables as soon as they were available in early 2013 (they were some of the first on the market, and I still have two of those that I use regularly -- the rest having over the years been passed off to friends and relations-- if I'm not mistaken only one of them failed, and I asked them for a replacement -- poor monoprice, whatever happened to them?).
There was no USB-C at the time. The alternatives were all proprietary (cf. Zune's proprietary cable, Sandisk's Sansa dock cable, and dozens of others at the time). Android phones were usually using micro USB, lots of things were using mini USB, but lightning was a well-designed connector that solved many annoyances of not only Apple's older cables but what was wrong with all the other options too. Simple, reversible. Few moving parts. I liked it.
Very quickly there was talk of a new standard (this calls for that old xkcd "there are 14 competing standards..." comic), that would be like lightning but not. Reversible and all that. Higher bandwidth. Able to support multiple data streams, audio, a huge list of things. The standards body is the USB-IF, and among it's notable members -- one with a huge market share and lots of engineering resources -- is Apple. So in the end we get a pretty nice and useful connector, almost as small as lightning, potentially much more versatile, and certainly better than the micro-USB you'd find on all the Android phones at the time. Of course, Apple itself was an early proponent of USB-C, and introduced hardware in which that was the only connection option. And now, slightly longer than a decade after lightning's introduction, it's poised to transition to USB-C on the iPhone.
USB-C isn't perfect (Does this cable support power delivery? Thunderbolt 3 or 4 or neither some half-way point? Will just plugging it in fry my Nexus 6P or my MacBook if I connect it though the PD port on this Anker expansion dock -- both of those real things that happened and were covered widely in the tech press, and in the case of the Anker dock is one I worry about because I use one of those). As transitions go, it's weird -- sometime I can connect something, but it doesn't always work as expected, or at all, or as fast as I wish. All of which are familiar problems with any connecter unfortunately. On the whole, I like USB-C as much, if not more, than lightning (and lightning was great -- plugging in my iPhone 5 for the first time was quite pleasant, and I'm not one to gush about tech too much, despite reading and following a site like MacRumors). That tiny plug going into that slender phone after using an iPod touch 2 and a flip phone for a few years as my primary mobile communications means was revolutionary (and you know neither of those used the same cable -- I kept an extra 30-pin and an extra -- also absurdly priced -- LG phone cable for those two). Switching to USB-C won't be overnight and may not -- in fact, I'd go so far as to say will not -- be the last tech transition we all make.
But I'll be happy to pour one out for lightning when I replace the last of my devices that uses it -- but I would bet I'll keep a few around because someone I know will be using something that uses it. As it is, I have an iPod cable and various micr and mini USB cables in my laptop bag because I still have junk that uses those. Oh well. Looking forward to whatever is next.
with 100%. People just don’t know what a mess USB C is at present.