I hear this argument a lot but for some reason i never plug my iPhone into my laptop for charging, mainly because its a lot slower than using an outlet. 95% of the time i charge it at night and that's fine for the day. In the rare cases where i need to charge on the go i use an outlet or a small powerbank i always have with me.

I do not understand your comment as I almost never plug my iPhone into my laptop for charging: I plug my iPhone into my laptop as USB is a much faster and more stable transfer conduit than bluetooth (for tethering) and is essentially required for doing most development work.

Ah ok, i didn't think about the mobile developer usecase, thats a valid point. Tethering works fine for me via Bluetooth but i don't use it very often, so that might be valid too. But then a simple USB-C -> Lightning cable will solve your issues right ?

But then we come back to the premise, as you are literally just stopping at the end if my first paragraph: that works until I need to charge my phone and tether or develop at the same time, something of particular importance as there is no way to connect the phone over USB without it draining the battery of the computer into the phone.

Maybe the understanding gap here is that you don't really use your laptop very much? I use my laptop constantly. I am a developer (as are probably most people on this website), and I own a fancy laptop so I can be mobile: not thinking about the use case of a mobile developer is very strange in the context of a conversation about mobile computers in a large group of developers.

(To be clear, to avoid even more miscommunication: despite the relatively small warts in this setup which seem to violate the standard design process of Apple, I like this computer and purposefully chose it with complete knowledge of what cables it would require. I wish it had a second USB-C port instead of the headphone jack, even though that would cause me to carry around another adapter, as the adapter usage would be less, but I appreciate this was essentialy their beta of USB-C and was not where and when they wanted to start the headphone war.)

I use my laptop for work and private 10-12 hours a day and am a developer myself, i just don't develop mobile apps, mostly backend services with python/go/php so i actually hardly connect my phone to the Laptop.

Sorry i actually did not reread your original comment when replying and was assuming this was about the Macbook Pro... If you only have one port there is indeed only the usb-c hub solution which can be annoying.

I have a 13000mah charger unit with 2.1A out for my Samsung phone etc. Quite neat design; why not just get one of these if you're going to be carrying so much stuff around anyway? Could use it as a bit of spare power for the 12" as well.

I don't understand how that helps: that just replaces the power supply. So now I have my laptop charging from the power brick over USB-C and I still need the dongle to attach the phone at the same time as I charge my laptop. (I am guessing you meant to charge the phone; but not only wasn't the premise--the laptop is the device that is going to need to charge, particularly when you are using the phone over USB--it doesn't come up often as the power block for the laptop is just a 29W USB-C charger, so when it doesn't make sense to charge the phone from the laptop as if the laptop were a battery pack I can plug it directly into the wall.)

Yep I meant to charge the phone; my thoughts were if you are going to be carrying extra stuff to charge the phone then might as well carry parts that extend overall battery life. (And I was thinking of away from wall usage scenarios.)

Wow. Now that is hell.