There is physical connections between devices. The pins that make electrical contact. There are 24 on UsbC and 8 on lightning making a lot more things possible.

Also there are structural benifits. Lightning connectors are held in by the device which makes replacing the clamp a lot more difficult than just switching the cable like UsbC, where that mechanism is inside the cable.

And last but not least is Usb an open protocol while you would have to pay Apple if you wanted to implement Lightning.

[–] BornVolcano@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

You just had me unplugging my cable to shine a flashlight down it to look for the pins haha. Thank you for the info!

[–] reddit_sux@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though lightning had 8 pins, for being reversible it is actually 2 pairs of 4 pins.

USB-C works around this by using cc1/2 pin which indicates the orientation of the connection.

[–] sebi@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I think the Lightning-Protocol was a little more difficult, because there were Display Adapters which probably need more than 4 lanes. And who could forget: some iPad actually had Usb 3 over Lightning.