We need to have a serious chat about iPhone repairability. We judged the phones of yesteryear by how easy they were to take apart—screws, glues, how hard it was…
The lightning connectors problem is that the pins are actually exposed on the end of the cable. With USB-C they're safely housed in a shroud but I guess the one cent worth of metal that would have been required to actually put a shroud on the cable just wasn't worth it for Apple.
Have you ever seen those shroudless USB-A devices they wear out in about 4 minutes.
The lightning connectors problem is that the pins are actually exposed on the end of the cable. With USB-C they're safely housed in a shroud but I guess the one cent worth of metal that would have been required to actually put a shroud on the cable just wasn't worth it for Apple.
Have you ever seen those shroudless USB-A devices they wear out in about 4 minutes.