Which is literally exactly what Apple did when they moved from the older connector to lightning in the first place lol.

What's the advantage of using USB-C? Because it's a standard, right?

Other than support for superior data transfer speeds, energy carrying ability, and durability? Yeah, it would be that it is an almost universal standard outside of the Iphone.

A standard means wide support and it works with what you already have. Except Apple had effectively already established that with Lightning. It was in hundreds of millions of devices before USB-C became mainstream.

For well-established standards this is correct, but every standard has to start out somewhere, and you'll find once upon a time lightning was faced this exact same argument.

Sure USB-C was nominally standard, but Lightning maintained the advantages for Apple's customers as a de facto standard.

A defacto standard for more or less only Iphones, as Apple switched almost all of their other products to use USB-C once it reached mass adoption.

You'll find that being locked into Apple's proprietary charging standard maintained a much larger advantage for Apple than it did their customers in allowing Apple to demand royalties/licensing fees from any 3rd parties that wanted to make charging accessories.

The switch to USB-C meant buying new cables, while Lightning meant using the cables you already had.

You could make this argument against the adoption of any new standard, again baring in mind that once upon a time lightning stood was the new standard that faced this exact criticism.

Also, had Apple just allowed other manufacturers to make use of lightning as a standard, you wouldn't even need to worry about this right now - thus this is a rod for Apple's own back, which they won't mind since they already got off with the money.

Source for them contributing towards USBC prior to implementing lightning port?

Lightning came out in 2012, USB-C came out in 2014, not exactly "forever"

This is just cope man come on

Man you're just proving you have no idea what you're talking about with every response.

With lightning, Apple essentially added DRM to the connector, requiring cable manufacturers to pay Apple for each sold cable.

"Lightning also introduced additional protocols that could only be officially supported through the MFi program."

"The Apple MFi Program has no fee to join, but there are two costs associated with membership; a company wanting to join has to pay for a third-party identity verification and pay royalties to Apple once approved, and neither cost is mentioned in Apple’s MFi FAQ documentation. Royalty fees in particular are covered by an NDA, making finding actual pricing difficult.

According to an Apple Insider article from 2014 (which is the newest pricing source available), MFi royalties run $4 USD per connector (e.g., a lightning port) on a device. It is unknown if this information is still correct. I contacted Apple and received this response:

All publicly-available information about the MFi Program is available on our FAQ page: http://mfi.apple.com/faqs. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide further details about the MFi Program beyond those provided in the FAQ."

Additionally, the point of standards in general is to reduce waste and make interoperable devices much easier across manufacturers, something Apple consistently has proven they have to be forced to do. For example... iMessage and the lightning connector. They can provide excuses all they want but the truth is plain to see, they frequently hoard technology for themselves and intentionally make products that don't function with existing products in the name of profit.

Don't get me wrong, it's smart of them to do from a monetary standpoint, but that doesn't make it right and consumers should be smarter.