They did it because the lightning port is proprietary and digital. You need to pay them to license it, and they can put DRM on it when they eventually choose to. That's main reason that they will never admit.
I keep hearing this silly conspiracy theory, but the numbers just don't add up.
Apple makes the princely sum of $4 per accessory on MFI licensing fees. Last year, those licensing fees made up less than one fifth of one percent of their revenue, a number so tiny that it doesn't even show up as a line item in their financial reports.
It would be such a spectacularly stupid decision to jeopardise sales of the world's most profitable smartphone just to try and add squeeze a minuscule amount of extra revenue out of MFI fees, it completely beggars belief that anyone is even considering it as a possibility.
Regarding DRM, Apple is the company that forced music labels to abandon DRM on their distribution platform the moment it became clear that Apple held all the power in that relationship. What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim. Apple (like many other companies, to be fair) uses product announcements as a way to force a positive press coverage bubble during product launches since only people who generally write nice things about them are given the products to review. It would be easy to see how Apple will 'delay' licensing of companies that don't play ball and produce accessories compatible with the new phones.
>What possible conceivable benefit could there be for them to sneakily try and add it back now?
They have always been pro DRM. For e.g. They force you to be on a constant iOS update treadmill, where they have made it impossible to downgrade iOS, and almost impossible to avoid updating it with the constantly popups to update.
>GP's point was that when Apple forces accessory makers to come to them for a license, they can arbitrarily chose to deny a license according to their whim.
Well it's a pretty fatuous point then, since Apple could have been playing that game for the last 10 years if they wanted to given the iPhone has had a custom port since day one and nothing about that has changed whatsoever.
