They wouldn't want customers worrying about whether they got the better qualcomm iPhone X or the slower intel iPhone X.
Apple could have chosen to make everything with the faster qualcomm chips, but they prob wanted to derisk their supply chain by diversifying onto two chip manufacturers (and perhaps play them against each other for negotiating power)
Either ways, once you arrive a the result that you need to chip manufacturers making chips for the same phones, you need to make sure your customers have practically the same experience regardless of the underlying hardware they end up with
Consistency is key
The iPhone is an outlier because due to the insane number of devices out there, if you change it now everyone's Lightning accessories are dead in the water. But it doesn't really matter now. Only thing Lightning gets used for most users is charging and it works fine for that and people have cables and chargers already floating around. This isn't a big deal really. They ship a USB-C to Lightning cable with the last 2 iPhones I bought and all my chargers are USB-C.
The USB 2.0 speeds are a big deal.
If your iCloud Drive is full and your phone is full, your wired backup that should take 20 minutes is going to take 14 hours.
I hope the EU forces their hand on putting USB-C in at USB 3 or Thunderbolt speeds.
Last time I plugged anything in other than for charging was an iPod. Even my DSLR talks to the phone via WiFi.
your use case isn't the only use case, expanding the possible use cases in obvious ways expands what users would do, such as upgrading 10 year old technology. News at 11.
Or you could just stop punching yourself in the balls i.e. use WiFi and FGS just pay $3 for some storage rather than coming up with a wobbly straw man.
My experience is fairly vast. I use iOS for music/video/photography (iPad Pro), and support 11 other iOS devices (excluding watches, homepods) across my family who range from biochemical engineers to students to children to retirees to software engineers. That use case NEVER comes up these days in my experience unless you're hurting yourself.
why are you worried about accessories? Apple absolutely is not worried about that, one of their favorite things to do is pull the rug under accessory holders.
This simply isn’t borne out by fact. The entire iPod, iPhone and iPad (non-Pro) range, going back over 20 years, have had exactly two connectors.
I bet there isn’t someone at Samsung or Motorola who can even tell you how many different connectors their products have used over that period of time, let alone what they were.
The EU is only forcing Apple to ship with USB-C so that every single mobile device uses the same connector for charging.
Basic iPads only support USB2.0 transfer rates (480 Mbps). The iPad Pros get full Thunderbolt speeds. Expect the same for iPhones, I'd say.
The EU mandate is about forcing a single connector type. It doesn't say anything about quality of service of the connector, because ultimately it depends on the device.
I like comparing it to a Raspberry Pi 4 that does the same thing.