> the biggest difference is that those technologies were all on the downward slope of their popularity when Apple made the move
This was not the case when Apple pushed hard on USB as compared to other peripheral standards with the iMac in the late '90s.
Would you like to revise your priors concerning Apple products?
http://www.macworld.com/article/1133334/original_imac.html
"Considering all these amenities, the most shocking part of the iMac isn’t what it offers, but what it lacks. The iMac has no floppy drive, which might be forgivable if there were a Zip drive or other removable-media option, but there isn’t.
And most dramatically, this new consumer offering has no SCSI port, no standard serial ports, and no ADB ports. Apple has opted to replace these familiar connections with USB, a high-speed serial architecture that has suffered from slow adoption on the Wintel platform despite its technical advantages (see the sidebar “USB: Ready for Prime Time?”). Currently, no USB devices exist for the Mac."
Many think it was the iMac that made it into the success it has become.
Lightning is just a stop-gap.