this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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Lightning existed before USB-C, and was reversible while everyone else was using Micro-B. Also, storage on the iPhone 5 was so slow that it wouldn't make much of a difference, I doubt it would even saturate USB 2.0 bandwidth. While lightning wasn't very forward thinking of Apple when it comes to bandwidth, keep in mind that at the time, you couldn't even access the file system on iOS, and the files were ridiculously small compared to today.
Two years after Apple introduced the Lightning port, the USB-C spec was published, and there are some Apple engineers who contributed to the specifications of USB-C. Apple quickly adopted it for the Mac, but it was clear that they were hesitant to switch the iPhone in 2015... they could have easily done it, but chose not to.
I don't know why they chose to keep the lightning port for so long (ego making them not want to admit that they designed a port that wasn't very future proof?), but for the first two years, it was more convenient than the only competition at the time which was Micro-B.
Usb3 came out in 2008 and lightning came out in 2012. You are confusing it with USBC
I'm very well aware of that and I never meant to imply that lightning predates USB 3.0, however, the biggest complaint that people had about lightning is that it's limited to USB 2.0 speeds. My comment was pointing out that it would have been very strange for Apple to make the lightning port USB 3.0 when the iPhone 5 had such slow storage read/write speeds, and no user accessible filesystem. Most phones at the time used Micro-B at USB 2.0 as well, and a year later, the Note 3 came out with a USB Micro-B with 3.0 speeds, but that was very rare (I'm not aware of any other phone with USB Micro-B with that wide 3.0 connector).
USB 3.0 speeds on phones only became common with the Type-C connector, not prior to it.