Comment by KK7NIL

> These non-axial forces are a known cause of USB-C port failures and are explicitly not accounted for in the standard 10k-cycle durability claim.

I agree and that's par for the course for any standard, they have to limit the requirements to something that is economically manufacutrable and testable.

Meanwhile, lightning connectors have no public standard to speak of so this is a mute point.

> USB-C center tongue female design means that the port will break before the cable. With lightning, the cable plug takes all the stress.

This is another a priori armchair expert argument which I just put very little weight on without data to back it up.

> Apple doesn’t publish insertion cycles rating for Lightning connectors, so it’s impossible to provide empirical evidence of that.

That conclusion does not follow. We can still obtain empirical evidence through direct testing without Apple publishing anything.

> In my personal experience, I’ve had two USB-C ports go bad on two MacBooks. I’ve yet to own a USB-C-charging phone, but I’ve never had a Lightning port fail.

That's fair, everyone has different anecdotal experiences as a foundation for their opinion here. The problem is that anecdotal data is just not very informative to others, that's all.