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Apple forced to ditch iPhone lightning charger
(www.bbc.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
No it wasn’t. The very first version of USB-C was standardized 2 years later. It didn’t get to feature parity with lightning until Thunderbolt support was added at the 5 year mark.
Lightning has been and still is USB 2.0 (I don't remember any products with faster speeds)