Comment by xp84

> Who cares how much the Apple battery pack costs?

Since I wrote this, I have seen a screenshot that implies that a USB-C dongle might exist (in box? Who knows), which would allow plugging in normal batteries with a normal cable, but I can explain good reasons to get upset about this kind of thing:

When they use a proprietary connector on the top end and hardwire it to the battery on the other end, that creates a ton of problems:

1. Fraying cable? Chuck the good Li-ion battery in the trash and buy a new $200 one! Apple loves the Earth so much :)

2. The proprietary connectors are probably patent-encumbered, meaning the only ones available third-party are either overpriced because they're paying a steep MFi royalty, or they're made by fly-by-night Chinese companies with no quality control. This is the entire history of the Lightning (and Dock) connectors. With those, they added on DRM chips IN the cables too. That useless increased complexity makes the 3rd-party alternatives worse and unreliable because they have to reverse-engineer the standard. Everybody who has ever bought a 3rd-party Lightning cable has experienced this failure mode. So, many consumers absolutely do pay $20 a pop for Apple-branded cables, or they (absurdly, in my opinion) carry around the single, delicate Apple cable from their device box from place to place until it fails, and then buy another one.

Another perfect example of this is the Watch. Apple chose to make that a closed proprietary standard instead of using USB or publishing specs. They offer a couple models of crappy first-party chargers, one of which costs a fortune. I bought third-party Watch + phone combo chargers years ago. When Apple switched to USB-C Watch chargers, the watches in that generation and after will only charge incredibly slowly over the course of about 8 hours using any USB-A Apple charger, or any third-party charger -- chargers which worked quickly on the old watches. It's impossible to tell now which third-party Watch charger sold today might use the "newer" standard, or even really to know what changed! The only solution is to re-buy a bunch of first-party obnoxious pucks-with-a-cable-hardwired for $25 a piece.