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Apple products are generally well-designed, but in addition to the occasional genuine screw-up, which they just handle in spectacularly arrogant ways, Apple’s engineers are absolutely no strangers to planned obsolescence.
Personally I’ve only witnessed their habit of using capacitors rated 85°C next to the 90+°C CPU instead of ones rated 105°C and costing a fraction of a cent more.\ Guess which small part fails after a few years and makes a logic board replacement necessary (or 30min with a toolkit and SMD soldering station if you know what the problem is). It’s difficult to believe that this is an honest mistake.
The Lightning connector has a design flaw that wears off the contact surfaces way faster than it should.
There are many other stories in self-repair forums that I can’t personally vouch for, but at least to me they look credible enough.
IIRC Louis Rossmann has done a YouTube video on it, which I can’t find at the moment as the plane wi-fi blocks streaming services.
The lightning connectors problem is that the pins are actually exposed on the end of the cable. With USB-C they’re safely housed in a shroud but I guess the one cent worth of metal that would have been required to actually put a shroud on the cable just wasn’t worth it for Apple.
Have you ever seen those shroudless USB-A devices they wear out in about 4 minutes.