I'm a big fan of this change, however, I think to a black mirror episode [0] where essentially little robot dogs could interface with everything they came into contact with because every connection was the same, it may be trivial to have multiple connections for a weapon like this but the take away I had from this is that 'variety' may be better than a single standardized solution. Partly because it is more expensive to plan for multiple types of inputs and making the cost of war go up will make it more difficult which I think inherently is the idea behind some of the larger cybersecurity companies, a hack can only work once then everyone has defenses for it after that single successful attack, this makes it more expensive to successfully stage attacks. Huge digression from this convo... but I think back to this constantly.
Many defensive are a trade off between the convenience of non attackers, and the trouble created for attackers.
Given the sheer number of devices we interact with in a single day, USB-C as a standard is worth the trade off for an increase in our threat surface area.
1000 Attackers can carry around N extra charging wires anyway.
10^7 users having to keep say, 3 extra charging wires on average? That’s a huge increase in costs and resources.
(Numbers made up)
Two thoughts:
1) Surely the world conquering robo-army could get some adapters.
2) To the extend to which this makes anything more difficult, it is just that it makes everything a tiny bit less convenient. This includes the world-conquering robo-army, but also everything else we do. It is a general argument against capacity, which can’t be right, right?
So I suppose Lightning's abysmally slow transfer speed is also a security feature? No way you can exfiltrate my photo roll at 60 MBps :)